


Hold On To This Feeling

by flawedamythyst



Series: Don't Stop Believin' [1]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Clint Barton's Farm, Cuddling & Snuggling, Den Mother Bucky Barnes, M/M, No Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, On the Run, Pack Dynamics, Pining, SHIELD Agent Clint Barton, Scenting, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:54:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 42,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23917882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/pseuds/flawedamythyst
Summary: Hydra send their Asset to capture a promising young SHIELD agent so they can make him one of their tools, but the mission goes wrong as soon as the Asset recognises Hawkeye's scent.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Series: Don't Stop Believin' [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2084070
Comments: 241
Kudos: 742
Collections: Winterhawk Bingo





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kangofu_CB](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/gifts).



> Huge and Endless love for Nny and CB for handholding, cheerleading and betaing. Special present for CB and her love of werewolves who get distracted from violence by their true love's scent.
> 
> Written for my Hawkeye/Winter Soldier square for Winterhawk Bingo.

"Ready to comply."

The handler gestured at the technicians to remove the restraints, then handed the Asset a folder.

"Your target."

The Asset opened the folder to find a photo of a SHIELD agent and his eyes darted immediately to the list of his skills. Marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, infiltration, all the usual skills of an agent, other than the archery, but a projectile weapon was a projectile weapon. The Asset had never had a problem defeating agents armed with guns, he didn't see any difference here.

"Your mission is to detain, not terminate," said the handler. "He has got too close to our work, but we can use him." He didn't explain further, but his eyes flicked to the chair and the Asset didn't need him to.

"And there'll be no shifting on this one," added the handler. "He may be monitored, and we don't want to give all our secrets away."

The Asset nodded. He didn't have opinions about mission parameters, but it would be easier after the mission if they didn't have to clean blood from his fur.

He was outfitted with all the usual weapons as well as two syringes of midazolam.

"No debilitating injuries," the handler reminded him. "We can wait for a broken bone or two to heal, but we need him to be operational."

The Asset nodded. 

"He has been given an observation mission on this rooftop," said the handler, gesturing at a satellite view of a series of warehouses along a harbour. The Asset didn't know what city they were in, or even which country, but it didn't matter. He took in the surrounding structures, memorising rooftops and alleyways.

"He should be watching in this direction," said the handler. "You will be landed here, by boat."

He would need to climb up the side of the warehouse and approach the target from behind, across the rooftop, but if he moved quietly enough, and the target was properly focused on his own mission, he should be able to inject him before he even knew he wasn't alone. It would then be easy to transport his unconscious body back down to the boat, and be miles away before his handlers even knew anything had happened.

Except that wasn't close to how it went.

The captain turned the boat's engine off before they got close to the warehouse and they paddled in the final distance, then The Asset pulled himself up the wall of the warehouse, using drain pipes and window sills to make his way to the roof. The boat drifted out further into the harbour and the agents in it pulled out fishing rods as a cover.

The Asset reached the top of the wall and peered over, and was hit by the first deviation from the plan.

Hawkeye wasn't crouched on the other side of the building, looking down at where he'd been told his own target was. Instead, he was lying on his back in the middle of the roof, throwing a knife into the air and catching it one-handed, and arguing with himself.

“Aw, come on, Coulson, we both know this mission is bullshit.”

No, not with himself. With his handler.

The Asset experienced a deep sense of disquiet at just the idea of speaking back to a handler, let alone telling one that a mission was bullshit. Once you had your orders, why would you even speak to them before the mission was complete?

“I don't care what the intel says, we both know there is no way in hell that Mishkin is going to be coming out to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere at this time of night, and definitely not on the third Thursday of the month.”

The Asset's grip on the wall of the warehouse was beginning to feel precarious, so he shuffled along to his left until he was hidden behind a curved silver air vent, and pulled himself up onto the roof. He paused behind the vent and glanced around again, but it was clear he wouldn't be able to get any closer without the target immediately spotting him.

“Of course I know better than those idiot analysts. I've been following the guy for months, and third Thursday of the month he's _always_ at _Razzle Dazzle_ for Broadway Karaoke. You heard the recording of him practising _The Music Of the Night_ in the shower yesterday, same as I did. This is it, man, the month he finally plucks up the courage to do more than watch, and I'm missing it with this crap.”

The Asset could rush him, of course, and he was unlikely to be a match while he was unprepared and lying down, even with the knife already in his hand, but he would almost certainly make enough noise to alert his handler. The Asset had been expressly told that this needed to be a stealth mission.

Instead the Asset hunkered down behind the vent, because at some point Hawkeye had to go back to his post. Didn't he?

The idea of an agent not staying exactly where he'd been told to be was disturbing the Asset enough without him contemplating the idea of him throwing off the mission entirely, so he pushed the thought away.

“Okay, okay, if I'm being made to wait out this bullshit, you should at least entertain me. What would you sing at Broadway Karaoke?”

_If I were king of the forest..._ thought The Asset and then wondered where that had come from. If his mind was already glitching, then he needed to complete this mission as soon as possible so that he could be taken in for recalibration.

The thought of it sent a shudder through him and he carefully breathed, telling himself that he was fine. There were no glitches and no need to be recalibrated. He would wait for the target to move and then take him down just as silently as he'd been instructed. Afterwards they'd return to the base and he'd either be allowed to sleep again or be given another mission.

No recalibration required.

“Oh shit, really? Oh man, I would pay to see that.”

The target flipped his knife up to spin around several times, letting out a low, infectious laugh that sent an odd wave of warmth through the Asset's stomach.

“Of course it would be,” said Hawkeye, and then actually sang a few lyrics in a quiet, rough voice. “ _Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world, you took the midnight train going anywhere._ C'mon, it's practically about me.”

The Asset was struck by a desire to hear a full song being sung by that voice and gritted his teeth behind the mask. When had he even last heard music?

He didn't need music. He was the Fist of Hydra, he was ushering in a new age and he had more important things to concentrate on than songs or karaoke or theatre.

“Yeah, I know,” said Hawkeye, “I mean, I love her like a sister, but she's dead wrong about that, _Don't Stop Believing_ definitely counts as Broadway. Okay, okay, fine, in that case I would go for _Cell Block Tango_ , all the way. Oh yeah, with all the voices. Are you doubting my ability to do it?”

The Asset shifted his weight slightly, checking that the two syringes were still easily to hand, and wondered how long he'd be waiting.

_As long as it takes, soldier,_ came the echo of a voice he didn't recognise and he felt a scowl take over his face. He was glitching. He would have to report it when he went back in.

The target let out a sigh and sat up, catching the knife one last time and tucking it away in a sheath. “Oh fine, go do your job then, and leave me to die of boredom waiting for a mob boss who isn't coming.”

He was facing the Asset's direction and the Asset froze still, barely even breathing, and hoped that the dark of his clothing blended with the night enough to keep him hidden. The shine of his left arm was at least hidden behind the vent.

“Yeah, yeah, see you at debrief, when I _will_ be saying 'I told you so',” said the target, then he reached to his ear and flicked something on the device there.

Turning off his comms. The Asset didn't have to worry about the handler overhearing any more.

The target's shoulders slumped and he let out a tired sigh, then glanced up at the night sky for a moment before, finally, standing up and walking over to the edge of the roof to look down.

The Asset moved the moment the target had his back to him, rising to his feet and moving as quickly and as soundlessly over the roof as he could. He pulled a syringe out and aimed for the target's shoulder so that he could inject it into his muscle the moment he had his metal arm wrapped around Hawkeye's chest, holding him immobile while the drug to pump into his veins.

But that part of the plan went wrong as well. The Asset wasn't sure what alerted Hawkeye - perhaps a reflection in the windows of the warehouse across the way? - but he spun around and ducked under the Asset's arm, pulling his knife again and slashing up at the Asset's chest.

The knife skittered off the Asset's Kevlar, but it was enough to make him fall back.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked Hawkeye, and his hand went towards his ear.

The Asset couldn't allow him to call for backup. He rushed the target, pushing him onto his back and knocking away his hand before he could reach his comms. He raised the syringe again, but Hawkeye wasn't prepared to go quietly. He started fighting like a man possessed, knocking the syringe out of the Asset's hand and then curling his shoulders up so that he could headbutt him, which the Asset only narrowly avoided. He forced his weight down on Hawkeye, pressing his arm across his shoulders as he grabbed for the second syringe, because this was why you always had a back up.

Hawkeye still had a hand free though, and he lashed out at the Asset's face, catching the edge of the mask and tearing it off.

His scent rushed in. The Asset froze, because that wasn't the smell of a normal human. Hawkeye was a wolf, just like he was.

That hadn't been in his file.

Hawkeye struck out at him again, struggling against the Asset's arm, and the Asset snapped out of his shock because a mission was a mission, even when the target wasn't entirely human.

It just meant that he would be more useful to Hydra, once he was broken in. Just like the Asset was.

He took the syringe more firmly in hand so that it wouldn't be knocked aside like the first one. The target struggled harder, biting out curse words, and the Asset leaned in to inject the muscle in his shoulder and-

He froze.

That scent. That wasn't just any wolf scent. That was _his_ wolf scent.

“Why do you smell like me?” he asked.

Hawkeye stared up at him. “What the fuck?” he asked, and grabbed for the Asset's hair. “Get the _fuck_ off me!”

The Asset depressed the syringe, sinking the drug into his shoulder, and Hawkeye stared up at him with wide, terrified eyes for the handful of seconds it took to inject it all.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and his struggles became frantic, clawing at the Asset’s face and hair.

The Asset stayed firm, holding him down as Hawkeye’s movements grew weaker and less coordinated.

“Fuckin’ asshole...” Hawkeye slurred and then his voice trailed away as his eyes slid shut.

The Asset stayed where he was for a moment to make sure Hawkeye really was out, then gave in to temptation and leaned in to take a deep breath of his scent from the warm skin of his neck.

He'd never smelled anything like him. He smelled like The Asset, but like himself as well, and like something else that the Asset thought he should remember but couldn't quite bring to mind. It was intoxicating, and he couldn't stop himself from pressing his face in tighter to take more of it into his lungs. It was sending strange emotions running through him: something like warmth and familiarity; an echo of how he'd felt when he'd heard Hawkeye singing; and along with that a strong surge of possessiveness because this man was _his_.

And Hydra wanted to hurt him.

The Asset froze in place. His mission was to take Hawkeye back, where he would be put in the chair and hurt, over and over until he was someone new, someone like the Asset. Someone who didn't sing, or laugh, or talk back to his handlers, and who the Asset might never see again unless they were put on a mission together.

Just the idea of it made him shudder and he sat back, staring down at the slack face of the target. He couldn't take him to be hurt by Hydra.

Even the thought felt like it should hurt. The Asset couldn't remember ever failing a mission but he already knew what would happen if he did. Pain, recalibration, punishment. He'd have failed Hydra. He'd deserve all of it.

He stared down at the motionless form beneath him, the rumpled blond hair, the line of his jaw, the nose that looked as if it had been broken at least a couple of times. Hawkeye didn't deserve what Hydra would do to him, though, and he was the Asset's. His scent made it very clear that he belonged to him.

The Asset didn't remember having anything that belonged to him before. How could he take him to Hydra to be hurt like that?

He wavered for another moment, then leaned in again to take another breath of Hawkeye's scent. It was enough to decide him. This man wasn't a target, and the Asset was going to take care of him. Hydra wouldn't lay a finger on him.

Which meant the Asset needed to get them away from here and stop Hydra coming after them. He needed them to think they were both dead, or they would hunt them to the ends of the earth.

He stood up, looking around at the rooftop. There was a black bag at the edge, where Hawkeye must have started his stake-out, with a bow resting on top. It looked heavy enough for the Asset's purposes.

He took the comms out of Hawkeye's ears and put them in the bag, then unclipped the quiver hanging on his belt and looped it around the bag. He went over the rest of what he was wearing, checking for trackers or other bugs, and found a burner phone that he added to the bag. Hawkeye was also wearing some kind of canvas collar around his neck, with a little zip pocket on one side, but there was nothing in it and the Asset couldn’t see how a tracker could have been implanted, so he left it on him.

The Asset took his own heavy Kevlar vest off and, after a moment of indecision, a couple of his larger guns. He bundled them all together into a heavy weight, then took everything over to the edge of the roof that looked over the harbour. He could see Hydra's boat had drifted far enough out that anything happening on the roof would just be shadows and noise to the agents in the boat, with their unenhanced human senses. Hopefully this was going to work.

First, though, he needed to deal with his own tracker. He pulled out his smallest, sharpest knife and held his arm up, trying to see the faint bump under the surface in the dim light. There. He took a deep breath and then sliced in, hard and deep, flicking the tracker out with the point of the knife so that it landed on the bundle of his Kevlar and guns. Blood was flowing down his arm so he flung it wide, sending droplets splattering over the roof, then waited for enough to gather into a pool that he could smear it over the edge of the roof, streaking down.

He tossed the knife aside, as if it had been lost in the fight, before glancing around at the scene he'd created and then over at the boat again. He took a deep breath, because there would be no going back from this. If he left Hydra, he would have nothing. No orders, no missions, nothing.

He wouldn't even have a name, if he was no longer Hydra's Asset.

A cold shudder of fear ran through him and he looked back at Hawkeye, still unconscious, to remind himself why he was doing this. That man belonged to him and he wasn't going to let him be hurt. He didn't have a choice, he had to run.

The Asset stood up at the edge of the roof and made a loud, pained yell, then threw the two bundles of equipment off the roof so that they landed with twin splashes in the harbour. Hopefully they would sink, or get swept away, and all that would be left would be smears of blood and the signal from the Asset's tracker, underwater and heading out to sea.

There were shouts from the boat but the Asset was already moving, darting back to Hawkeye and hauling him over his shoulder. He kept his body low so they wouldn't be seen and ran for freedom.

****

It didn't take long for him to get beyond the small patch of the city that he'd seen maps for. The area around the harbour was dark and deserted, but as he moved further into the city more people were moving about, forcing the Asset to retreat into alleyways or hide in doorways so that there wouldn’t be an alarm raised over the man in full combat gear, bristling with weapons, carrying an unconscious man over his shoulders.

He needed to find somewhere to hide, somewhere where he could keep Hawkeye safe and quiet even after he’d woken from the drug, until…

Until the Asset had worked out what to do next. He wasn’t letting Hawkeye go, not now he knew Hydra wanted him, but he didn’t think Hawkeye was likely to just meekly stay put wherever the Asset put him.

He’d deal with that later. Right now, he needed somewhere to hide.

He ducked away from a noisy bar further up the street into a darker side street, and a sense of deja vu settled over him.

He knew this place.

How could he know this place? He didn’t even know which city he was in. The accents of the people in the streets had let him know that they were in the USA, but they hadn’t been definitive enough to narrow down to a city beyond that.

Nevertheless, as he walked further down the street he found himself recognising more and more, although small details kept tripping him up. That door hadn’t been blue. Those neon lights hadn’t been there. That shop front should have been older, covered with wood rather than plastic, and it had been…

A barbers. That had been a barbers.

How did the Asset know that?

There were footsteps ahead and the Asset ducked down the alley next to the shop that should be a barbers, carrying Hawkeye behind a dumpster and crouching down.

On the wall next to his face there was a scratched sign. The Asset stared at it, recognition sparking but not connecting with any memories. That meant something. He’d once known what it meant.

He had no idea now.

He took a deep breath and glanced at the unconscious face of Hawkeye. With him slung over his shoulders, the Asset could smell his tantalisingly familiar scent, and the instinct to get him hidden and safe as soon as possible was nudging higher with every breath.

But where? Where could the Asset go? No hotel would let in two men dressed in combat gear, one of whom was unconscious. The Asset didn’t even have any money on him.

The footsteps passed by and the Asset took another breath, then looked at the sign again. Something was pulling him, and he didn’t know what else to do, so he followed it, giving into an instinct he didn’t understand and heading deeper into the alleyway.

There was a stack of trash that looked as if it had been there for years, with another symbol etched above it and he stumbled back further, clambering over another trashcan that blocked the alley to find an old, rusted fence. He hesitated, but there was another symbol, carved lower this time, and he crouched down, rolling Hawkeye off his shoulders and gently setting him down.

There was another stack of mouldering cardboard boxes which he pushed aside, then a sheet of pitted iron and then…

A trapdoor.

How the hell had he known that was there?

He looked again at the symbol marking it, but it wasn’t one he recognised as Hydra’s. Even if it was, this place looked long forgotten; if this was an old base or weapons stash he’d once known about, the chances were that no one else still living remembered it.

He pulled a gun out anyway, then carefully raised the trapdoor with his metal hand, snapping the padlock on it. A flight of concrete steps led down into the dark and he glanced back at Hawkeye, making sure he was out of sight of the street before starting down them, gun clutched in hand.

No darkness was ever truly dark for the Asset, not since he’d become a wolf, but it got as close as it ever did for him. He widened his eyes and started taking long, slow breaths through his nose, taking in the smells of dust and abandonment.

There was a steel door at the bottom with a shuttered peephole. He took hold of the handle and turned it slowly, hearing the lock crack and shatter under the force of his metal arm, then shoving it open against the crunch of rust breaking apart.

Inside was a dark corridor and the Asset glanced back up to where Hawkeye was, wary of leaving him alone too long. He couldn’t bring him down into a den until he was sure it was safe, though, so he pressed on.

The corridor wasn’t long and ended in a curtain that might once have been velvet, but when the Asset touched it, it just crumbled away. On the other side was possibly the last thing he’d been expecting, and a clear sign this wasn’t a Hydra base.

It was a bar. Or, it had been a bar once. The velvet-covered benches around the wall were mouldering and had large holes in them where rodents had made nests, the varnished wooden floor was pitted by rot, and the wide mirror behind the bar itself was inch-thick with dirt and grime. No one had been down here for years, which meant that no one would know about it.

Which meant Hydra wouldn’t know about it.

The Asset felt a smile crease his face. It should have been unfamiliar, but it felt weirdly right in this location.

****

The Asset spent most of the time before Hawkeye woke up trying to create an acceptable space for him to wake up to. He started by hiding the entrance again, shutting the trapdoor with the sheet of rusted metal still on top so that it would be hidden. He’d completely destroyed the lock on the security door getting in, so he moved the heaviest piece of furniture he could find, a squat iron safe, from the back office to in front of the door. It was heavy enough that even with his metal arm he found it a challenge, so he didn’t think anyone would be able to get in past it.

And Hawkeye wouldn’t be able to get out, although the idea of Hawkeye wanting to run from the Asset was upsetting in a way he didn’t understand.

He investigated the rest of the space and found that there had been a second entrance, one which looked like it had been the main entrance, but it was choked up with soot-stained rubble from above. It looked as if at some point the building above had had a fire. Everyone must have assumed that this place had gone up in it, but somehow it had survived.

Survived for the Asset to find it now and bring Hawkeye to it to keep him safe. That was all he needed, to keep him safe, the most important mission.

He looked around at the bar again and realised that he also wanted him to be comfortable, which might be a bit harder.

He found some ancient cleaning supplies in a cupboard and swept the floor as thoroughly as he could. There was still water coming out of the tap at the bar, although it took a while to come out and was red with rust until he’d run it for a few minutes. He wiped down a table, scrubbing with his metal arm until the wood was creaking, then gently lay Hawkeye out on it. 

He looked uncomfortable on the bare wood, but although there were cushioned bench seats around the outside of the room and a couple of booths in the corner, the cushions were caked in dust and some of them looked rotted through. The Asset wasn’t going to lay Hawkeye on those, not when he had no way to clean them and nothing to cover them with. Instead, the Asset stripped off the shirt he wore under his armour and folded it up for Hawkeye as a pillow, then stepped back to regard him, before glancing around the space again. It was still dark, there had to be a way to get some light.

It became very clear that the electrics were completely dead, but he found a large store of yellowing candles in a cupboard behind the bar. He set them around the place and lit them all until the light was at an acceptable level.

He looked around again and decided that he had done the best he could, given the resources available. He looked at Hawkeye again, at the relaxed sprawl of his long limbs, and couldn’t stop himself from moving back in close to get another whiff of his scent.

The calm sensation of warmth sank over him again and he pressed in closer, taking a deep breath.

If it smelled this good to his human nose, how much better would it smell to his wolf?

No. The orders had been not to shift for this mission.

Except the orders had also been to take Hawkeye back to Hydra, and he had disobeyed those. A shiver of mixed excitement and fear ran up his spine as he thought about that. If he’d disobeyed that order, he could disobey any order.

The memory of pain came to him, not attached to any context other than that it was the consequence of disobeying, but he’d already gone far enough that. If they did get him, he’d been punished anyway. It wouldn’t cost him anything more to keep going.

Besides, if he shifted to a wolf he wouldn’t need his clothes, and he could add them to the shirt under Hawkeye’s head and give him a proper pillow to lie on.

And maybe curl up next to him where his fur would keep him warm.

The idea of that, of lying down pressed against someone else made the Asset shudder with an unfamiliar feeling, especially as it would be Hawkeye, the man who smelled like, like… 

Like coming back from a mission and being told he’d done a good job and knowing he wouldn’t be punished, or like the time he was given a hot mug of something sweet after a mission in the snow, or when one of the handlers had slapped his shoulder and smiled at him after they’d both narrowly escaped an explosion.

None of those feelings quite matched it, though. It was so much more than all of them combined, and the Asset didn’t have the context for it. He just knew he wanted more of it.

He took off his clothes, folding his pants up to go under Hawkeye’s head with his shirt, then shifted into a wolf and leapt onto the table to snuffle at him.

Oh god. He smelled even better than the Asset could have imagined. Just one breath was enough to make all the tension sag out of his body and he collapsed down beside him, half covering Hawkeye’s body with his own and wrapping his tail around him. He pressed his nose in nice and close to Hawkeye’s neck and let out a gentle sigh, feeling his eyes half-shut. All his usual instincts to stay alert for any sign of danger were shutting down, leaving him with only one ear half-cocked for any sounds that might need investigating while the rest of him was completely focused on the scent of Hawkeye’s skin, the soft movement of his chest as he breathed, the faint pulse of his heartbeat where they were pressed together.

It was perfect.

****

It was nearly an hour later that Hawkeye finally woke up.

By then, the Asset had sunk down into a state of relaxation so complete that he barely even twitched when Hawkeye started moving under him. Waking up from the drug took a while, so the Asset didn’t see the point in rousing from his comfortable position just yet, not when Hawkeye wasn’t likely to recognise anything for a good few minutes anyway. He just shifted his metal paw further underneath his body to keep it hidden, and kept watching.

Hawkeye made a low, pained groan and his hands fumbled towards his face, then he fell still again. The Asset propped his head up so he could see his face, watching the way Hawkeye blinked up at the ceiling for at least five minutes, clearly not taking anything in. His eyes shifted to the left, then around to look at the Asset.

He made a vague murmuring noise, and a clumsy hand patted at the Asset’s ears, then Hawkeye’s attention was wandering off again, which was a shame. The Asset twitched his ears, wondering why that gentle touch had felt so nice.

Hawkeye stared at the nearest candle for a bit, then his eyes wandered back to the Asset. “Wolf,” he said vaguely, then cleared his throat. “It’sss…wolf.”

He patted at the Asset again, and started frowning. “Why’s a wolf?”

The Asset watched his confused expression and the way his attention wandered away again to the bar. He wasn’t sure why watching Hawkeye wake up like this was making the warm ball in his chest grow larger and the desire to protect him from all harm grow, but he found he rather liked the feelings, so he wasn’t going to think too hard about them right now. He was just going to stay here cuddled against Hawkeye while he woke up, asking the same handful of questions over and over without really seeming to expect any answers.

By the time Hawkeye’s voice had stopped slurring and he’d started making sense, the candles were beginning to burn low, and the Asset was thinking that he’d have to go and replace them with more out of the cupboard.

“You’re a cute wolf,” Hawkeye told him, stroking over his ears again. “No idea who you are though, should I? I don’t remember much. I was on a mission, I think.” He made a face. “And then I guess I got drugged, but I can’t remember who by, or why we’re in this shithole.”

The Asset lifted his head, looking around the room again. He’d done the best he could and he’d thought it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad compared to Hydra’s bunkers, not compared to wherever Hawkeye lived.

“You gonna let me up?” asked Hawkeye, patting at the Asset’s head, and every single touch from him just made the Asset want to crawl in closer. “I’m awake now, we can get out of here.”

No. The Asset shifted to press his full weight more firmly on top of Hawkeye, holding him in place. He wasn’t letting him go anywhere, not when Hydra would still be looking for them both.

“Okay,” said Hawkeye slowly. “Guess that’s a no, then. How about you shift back and tell me what’s going on, then?”

The Asset considered that. If he shifted back, there was a strong chance Hawkeye would recognise him as Hydra’s assassin. SHIELD had enough information about him for top level agents to know about his arm. Who knew what his reaction would be to that?

But if he didn’t shift back, there was no way Hawkeye would know the danger they were in, and he might try and leave. Just the idea of Hawkeye being outside, alone, made the Asset’s heart clench in fear.

He hesitated, torn between the options. He wasn’t used to having to make decisions on his own, not without a clear set of mission parameters to refer to, but he’d already thrown all his mission parameters away. How was he meant to decide what to do without them?

He’d given himself a new mission. What were the parameters for that?

He settled back on Hawkeye’s chest to think that over, and Hawkeye let out a sigh, stroking over his fur again. “Guess not,” he said, tiredly.

The Asset relaxed under the gentle movement of his hand. His mission was to protect Hawkeye. The parameters were to keep him hidden from Hydra.

“I’m kinda thirsty, any chance of a drink?” asked Hawkeye. “Do you know if I’ve got my gear with me? I have a bottle of water in my bag.”

The parameters should probably include keeping Hawkeye healthy, which meant food and water. The Asset’s urge to make him comfortable hadn’t felt like part of the mission, but maybe it should have. Comfortable people were less likely to leave where they were and go wandering around the streets where they could be picked up by Hydra agents. The Asset lifted his head off Hawkeye’s chest and gave him a careful look, considering the matter.

“Maybe I do know you,” said Hawkeye, and the Asset froze. “I don’t know, something familiar about you… I’ve never seen you as a wolf before right? And I don’t-” His voice trailed off as he lifted his head to press into the Asset’s fur and take a breath. The Asset froze still, with no idea how to react.

“Nah, I don’t know your scent,” said Hawkeye, laying back. “Just something familiar about it, can't put my finger on it.”

Disappointment washed over the Asset and it took him a while to realise why. Hawkeye’s scent had been so immediately recognisable as important to him, had filled him with so many unfamiliar emotions; it seemed wrong that Hawkeye wouldn’t have the same reaction in return.

“I’m not gonna just lie here all day, by the way,” said Hawkeye. “Nice as it is to have a cuddle, I do have responsibilities to be getting back to.” His hand found its way into the Asset’s fur again. “C’mon, man, give me some clues here. What’s going on?”

The Asset considered his options, then let out a sigh. He stood up reluctantly, stepping back and away from Hawkeye, letting him sit up properly. The move put his metal leg on display, and Hawkeye’s eyes riveted on it.

“Huh, that’s...okay, I definitely don’t know you.” He sat up, looking around at the bar in the light of the guttering candles. “Okay, seriously, what the fuck is going on? Where even are we? I was...I was on a rooftop, right? There was a stake out for...” his voice trailed off and he didn’t finish the sentence, still frowning around the room. 

“Where the hell are we?” muttered Hawkeye. “How do we get out?” He started to stand up off the table and the Asset moved without thinking, back into his lap to hold him down with the weight of his body.

“Okay, guess that means we don’t,” said Hawkeye, settling back onto his hands and giving the Asset an irritated look. “Hey, listen, I get that some shit clearly went down, but I kinda hate not knowing what’s happening and this waking up in an abandoned cellar bar thing is a bit too much like the beginning of a horror movie. I’m trying to be patient, man, cos you seem pretty freaked, but I’m gonna need something from you.”

The Asset growled to himself, but sat back, took a deep breath and shifted back to human, keeping his eyes on Hawkeye the whole time.

“Oh,” said Hawkeye weakly, and his eyes darted down over the Asset’s body, lingering on the clacking of metal plates shifting from a paw to an arm. “Oh wow. You’re...okay. Hi.”

“You can’t leave,” said the Asset.

Hawkeye’s eyes darted up to his mouth, and he frowned. “Say that again?”

“You can’t leave,” repeated the Asset. “There’s danger. You need to stay safe. Here.”

“Okay,” said Hawkeye, slowly. “And I’m just meant to trust you?”

The Asset felt himself frown. Why wouldn’t Hawkeye trust him? Couldn’t he tell from the Asset’s scent that they were...whatever they were. The Asset groped for vocabulary and couldn’t come up with anything that felt right. Comrades, perhaps.

“Right,” said Hawkeye after a moment’s pause. “Then how about you start by trusting me?”

The Asset grabbed for his ankle with his metal hand, holding it tight. “You can’t leave,” he repeated.

“Not going anywhere,” said Hawkeye, and he was using a slow, careful tone that was clearly meant to keep the Asset calm. “I’m just going to reach into my boot, okay? No weapons in there, nothing that’s gonna hurt you, just something I need so we can have a proper conversation.”

The Asset felt himself go stiff with tension. His boots. He hadn’t thought to check his boots, what was wrong with him? Mistakes like that could cost a mission, and that meant punishment.

Except he’d run from Hydra and there was no one to punish him. If he failed this mission, it would be Hawkeye who suffered.

For some reason, that seemed much worse.

“Okay?” said Hawkeye, and he was already reaching for his right boot. The Asset clenched his jaw but let him. It made sense to let him reveal whatever it was, to let him feel as if the Asset trusted him that far so that, hopefully, he’d trust the Asset when he told him they couldn’t leave this place.

“Okay, good,” said Hawkeye, flashing him a bright grin.

_Beautiful,_ whispered a part of the Asset’s mind that he hadn’t heard from in years, and he stared for a moment, taken aback by the spark of _something_ that the grin had set off in his chest.

Hawkeye had to loosen his laces to get into his boot, digging around in what looked like a custom-made pocket and eventually pulling out-

“No,” growled the Asset, grabbing the tiny communication ear buds from him. “No handlers.”

“Aw no, come on,” said Hawkeye, reaching for them, and the Asset jumped off the table, ignoring the dirt encrusting his feet as he took swift steps backwards.

“No handlers,” he repeated, clutching the comm units in his hand. He glanced around, looking for a way to dispose of them.

“No! No, wait!” said Hawkeye, hopping off the table. “Don’t! They’re not - you think they’re comms, right? They’re not, I promise, not gonna link with anyone. They’re hearing aids. I need them to hear what you’re saying properly, please don’t fuck with them.”

The Asset stared at him, then at his ears, then opened his hand and looked back at the devices. “They look like comms.”

“Yeah, see, I didn’t hear that,” said Hawkeye. He took a careful step forward, hands held out as if trying to tame a wild animal. “C’mon, man, I need those. Unless you know where the rest of my shit went, they’re all I’ve got. Don’t be a dick.”

There was desperation in his tone that made the Asset hesitate. He’d heard it before, in a hundred voices that he’d ignored because he had a mission to complete, but it felt different coming from Hawkeye.

He couldn’t ignore it. He felt caught in place again, torn between two choices with no directions on which way to go.

“Please,” said Hawkeye, quietly, and the Asset felt his willpower crumble at his tone.

He held the devices back out to Hawkeye, who let out a sigh of relief and grabbed for them. The Asset closed his hand at the last minute, and Hawkeye glanced up at his face, frowning.

“No handlers,” said the Asset, as clearly as he could. “Danger.”

Hawkeye’s eyes flicked up from his mouth and gave a nod. “No handlers, okay, you got it,” he said. “Just, let me have the aids and you can tell me why.”

The Asset opened his hand again and let Hawkeye take the devices from him. Hawkeye’s shoulders sank with relief and he immediately fitted them into his ears.

“Okay,” he said, looking up with a grin. “There we go, now I can hear you. So, tell me. What the fuck is going on? And, and this is kinda key for how well I’m gonna be able to pay attention, are you gonna put some clothes on?”

The Asset glanced down at his body. “It’s not cold,” he said.

Hawkeye raised an eyebrow. “Okay, it kinda is, but I can tell you don’t think so.” He gave the Asset a long look that was clearly intended to convey something, but the Asset had no idea what. The only times his handlers had paid attention to his body had been to check for injuries. 

Hawkeye pulled himself up to sit on the table, laces still dangling in a way that made the Asset itch to tie them up, but he kept himself in place. “Go on then,” said Hawkeye. “What’s going on?”

The Asset hesitated. He’d never been the one to deliver a mission briefing before, and he wasn't sure how much he should tell Hawkeye right now anyway. If he told him that the Asset had been sent to take him in, he’d stop trusting him.

“Seriously, man,” said Hawkeye, and the good-natured tone dropped away as if it had never been, replaced by the hard tone of a man used to violence, and the Asset saw the agent beneath Hawkeye’s relaxed attitude. “If you don’t get me something, I’m not gonna hang around here.”

The Asset managed a nod, pulling himself up as if he were reporting back to a superior officer, fixing his eyes just over Hawkeye’s shoulder. “Hydra have targeted you as a potential new asset,” he said. “They sent agents to capture you, and they nearly succeeded.” Would have succeeded, if Hawkeye’s scent hadn’t been so distracting. “They will be looking for you, for both of us. They have moles inside SHIELD who will be waiting for you to report in.” He flicked his eyes across to Hawkeye’s face. “No handlers,” he said again.

Hawkeye nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay. No handlers. Just...Hydra? Seriously? I thought they went out with the Nazis.”

The Asset shook his head. “They went underground,” he said. “They have infiltrated agencies and governments on a global scale.”

“Including SHIELD,” repeated Hawkeye, sounding bleak.

“At all levels,” confirmed the Asset. He should be feeling bad about betraying Hydra’s intel like this. He should be feeling the ghost of the pain he’d be put through if his handlers ever found out how readily he’d spilled all their secrets, but all he could think about was that sense of Hawkeye being his comrade. Sharing intel between comrades was standard practice.

“God,” said Hawkeye quietly, curling over to put his face in his hands. “You’re sure?” he asked, glancing up. “No way you could be mistaken?”

“I am never mistaken,” said the Asset firmly. Mistakes had been burnt out of him a long time ago.

Hawkeye let out a sigh, slumping. “Fuck,” he said miserably.

He was silent for a long few minutes. The Asset held his position, not sure what else he should be doing. It felt as if there was an action that should come when faced with someone looking as pained as Hawkeye did just then, but the Asset searched the procedures he’d been programmed with and came up with nothing.

When Hawkeye eventually raised his head, he had his jaw clenched with defiance. “Okay,” he said. “So, they want me as an asset, you said? What does that mean? Surely if they’re in SHIELD, they’ve already got access to me?”

The Asset gripped his hands into fists. “To become one of Hydra’s most prized assets, they will first take your memories,” he said, keeping his voice as steady and emotionless as he could. It was a lot harder than it had used to be, as if all the emotions that Hawkeye’s scent had prompted in him had caused others to bleed out from the box that Hydra’s procedures had kept them locked in. “A blank slate is easier to mould. They will condition you with complete loyalty. You will be programmed to follow orders without question. Between missions they will put you in storage. An asset needs no life outside of the next mission.”

“Oh shit,” said Hawkeye. “You’re talking about, what? Torture? Brainwashing?”

The Asset hesitated, running the definitions of those words through his mind and comparing them to what Hydra had made of him. “Yes,” he agreed. “They will use pain and electricity to remake you into their tool.” 

“Okay,” said Hawkeye. “I get why we’re hiding in a basement now.” He sounded grim, but the Asset could hear the determination beneath it, the sharp edge that any agent had.

“They cannot find us,” agreed the Asset.

Hawkeye nodded to himself, then looked up at the Asset with a perceptive eye. “Is that what they did to you?”

The Asset froze in place. If Hawkeye knew, if he knew that the Asset had been sent to capture him, he wouldn’t trust him, and he couldn’t keep him safe if he didn’t trust him.

“And you got away somehow, and then rescued me?” carried on Hawkeye. “Fuck, thanks, man. I’m lucky you didn’t just run for the hills.”

He thought the Asset had freed himself and then come back to stop Hydra getting hold of any other assets. He was technically correct; the Asset had got away and rescued Hawkeye, but the timeline had been rather quicker than Hawkeye thought.

“They can’t be allowed to hurt you,” said the Asset, carefully, because that much was true.

Hawkeye flashed a smile at him and it wasn’t the blinding one of earlier, but it was still enough to stop the Asset’s breath. “Thanks. Seriously, I really appreciate it. Promise I’m not gonna fuck both of us over by contacting anyone.”

The Asset nodded, because he wasn’t going to let Hawkeye have the chance. “We will stay here until the search is over,” he said.

Hawkeye made a face and looked around. “Seriously? We can’t go find a motel or something?”

“Too dangerous,” said the Asset. “You can’t be on the streets.”

Hawkeye sighed. “Where even are we?” he asked. “Looks like it hasn’t been touched in years.”

“The Boulevard,” said the Asset, and then froze still, because how did he know that? Where had that name come from? He looked around, and a split-second memory came to him, of standing here when it was bright with gas lamps and filled with people, there was laughter and music and a drink in his hand, and-

The memory collapsed. The Asset drew in a sharp breath. He was glitching. He needed to return to the technicians for recalibration. 

“Hey man, you okay?” asked Hawkeye, standing up again.

It was imperative that he returned to the technicians for recalibration. Priority one, overriding any other mission. The Asset must be kept in the best condition.

He turned away towards the door and Hawkeye took a step towards him. “Hey, are you-” He stepped on his trailing laces and tripped, heading straight for the floor, and the Asset moved without thinking, grabbing his arms and keeping him up, then hauling him upright.

“Goddamnit, would you take care for five seconds?” he snapped without thinking, the words flowing out of him like they were right and natural, and nothing he needed to carefully measure before letting out. An image wavered in front of his eyes of another tall blond, then vanished.

He really was glitching, but this time, with Hawkeye in his arms and his scent surrounding the Asset, he knew he couldn’t go back for recalibration. He had given himself a mission that came above even priority one.

“Jesus, okay,” said Hawkeye, pulling himself free. “I’m okay. Just, you didn’t see the look on your face then, that was-” He broke off and shook his head. “Fuck, and they want to do that to me?” he muttered, pulling away from the Asset’s hold.

The Asset struggled against the desire to keep him close so he could keep breathing in his scent, feeling it curl into his lungs, warming the Asset and driving out Hydra’s rules and protocols. He needed Hawkeye to trust him, and clinging to him like a teddy bear would not inspire confidence.

“Okay,” said Hawkeye, sitting back down on the table, but not doing his laces up. “So what now? If we’re meant to be hunkering down here, I really hope there is food and water, or we’re screwed.”

The Asset considered. “No food,” he said, but went behind the bar and found a glass that looked clean enough once he’d scrubbed at it a bit, ran the faucet until the water was running mostly clear, then took it back over to Hawkeye.

Hawkeye regarded it very suspiciously, but reluctantly drank it. The Asset watched him, weirdly captivated by the long line of his throat as he swallowed, then took the empty glass away and filled it again, draining it himself that time.

When he looked over at Hawkeye, his eyes were lingering rather lower than the Asset’s throat. “So, uh. Are you really going to wander around naked the whole time, or…?”

The Asset considered that. “I want to be a wolf,” he said, and it was the first time he’d expressed a personal preference that he could remember. Part of him braced himself for pain and a reminder that an asset didn’t have wants, he only existed to fulfil Hydra’s purpose.

“Okay, fair enough,” said Hawkeye, settling back on the table and moving the pile of the asset’s clothing under his head. “I guess if we’re just hiding out, a nap sounds pretty good.”

The Asset eyed him. The man had just been told that a secret terrorist group were searching for him, to torture him and turn him into their assassin, and yet he sounded rather blasé about the whole thing.

If he wasn’t taking this seriously, the Asset couldn’t keep him safe.

He shifted back to a wolf and paced across the room, jumping up on the table. Hawkeye looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “Hey man, are you-” The Asset settled down, half his weight over Hawkeye’s legs so that he couldn’t go anywhere without him knowing. “Ooph, okay, great, guess we’re snuggling again.”

He ran a hand over the Asset’s head, then around his ears. “Seems like Hydra aren’t so great at providing pack cuddles, yeah?”

Pack.

The Asset’s ears twitched and he pressed his nose back close to Hawkeye’s neck. That was it, that was the scent. Pack. 

Hawkeye was his pack. How did that make sense when they’d never met? 

He took a deep breath of Hawkeye’s scent and decided he didn’t care as the warmth and relaxation of being curled up around a packmate ran through him. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this before, but it felt as easy and instinctive as breathing. His packmate. No wonder he’d had to get him away before Hydra hurt him. You defended your pack no matter what.

The Asset was going to defend Hawkeye no matter what. Even if it killed him.


	2. Chapter 2

They stayed like that for a good couple of hours. The Asset thought Hawkeye might have drifted off to sleep at one point, but despite how comfortable it was to be lying together with someone that all his instincts insisted belonged to him, the Asset forced himself to stay awake, one ear pricked in case anyone came close.

The only thing he heard was rodents scurrying in the walls, but that didn’t calm his fears at all. Hydra would be out there, searching for them both. They wouldn’t just let the Asset go.

He thought he might have tried to run before. He could remember this feeling of terror and hope, remember the desperate desire to just crawl down deep into the first hole he could find and not come out until the world had changed, because that was the only way to really be sure that Hydra would have given up. If he reached really far into the blank caverns of his mind, he could remember crouching behind a bush while flashlights swept the woods surrounding him.

He hadn’t got away then, but he would this time. This time he had Hawkeye to protect, after all.

He had a packmate.

He raised his head to blink at Hawkeye’s face, taking in the strong line of his jaw and the mess of his hair. This man was his, and he needed to take care of him. He couldn’t just keep him down here on a table, with no food and water that contained god knew what.

The Asset needed to provide for his pack.

Hawkeye’s eyes opened, and there was no trace of sleepiness in them. The Asset wondered if he had slept after all.

“It must be morning now,” he said, and pulled his arm away from where it was resting on the Asset’s fur to check the time. He winced. “I mean, just about. How long are you going to keep us down here? Cuz, I really am kinda hungry now. Think we can get pizza delivery down here?”

They needed to stay there until Hydra had expanded their search wide enough for them to slip through, but that didn’t mean the Asset couldn’t improve their situation. He sat back, shaking his wolf form off until he was human again.

Hawkeye blinked at him, his eyes flicking down to take in the Asset’s body as if surprised by it, which made no sense.

“No pizza,” said the Asset.

Hawkeye sighed, pulling himself up to sit cross-legged on the table. “Okay, fine, but I am gonna need some food at some point. And water that’s not going to give me cholera.”

The Asset nodded. “I will go for supplies,” he said. He jabbed a finger at Hawkeye. “You will stay here. Stay hidden, stay safe.”

“Sure,” said Hawkeye, far too easily. “No problem.”

The Asset stared at him. Something in his brain was telling him he shouldn’t trust that tone of voice. Sometime, a long time ago, he’d heard someone else use it to make promises to stay safe, and those promises had always been broken. “You’re lying,” he realised, and frowned. “You have to stay here.”

“Okay, listen,” said Hawkeye. “I get it, okay, but there’s no reason I can’t come with you, or that we can’t find somewhere else-”

“No,” interrupted the Asset. “This place is a secret from everyone. It has always been a secret from everyone. You will stay here.”

And how had he known that about this place? A hazy half memory of ducking through the doorway, glancing over his shoulder as a doorman shut the door behind him came to him. The scratched signs outside and the hidden trapdoor made sense if it had been a secret, if even coming through the front door had been a secret.

He couldn’t remember any more than that though, no context or how and why he would have come here, or who he had been back then, before Hydra got their tentacles into his brain.

“Sure,” said Hawkeye again, grinning at him.

The Asset frowned at him. Putting aside the ancient half-memory that he couldn’t grip the whole of, he wasn’t used to people saying things they didn’t mean, and certainly not with a smile on their face. Hydra always meant what they said, and followed through on it afterwards, every last painful, bloody promise made flesh.

“Or,” said Hawkeye, “I could come with you. We could carry more supplies that way.”

The Asset shook his head. “They will be looking for you.”

“And they’re not looking for you?” asked Hawkeye. “C’mon, I’ll get bored, you don’t want that. Trust me, you don’t.”

The Asset shook his head. “Boredom is more easily combated than being turned into their asset,” he said. He stood up and started to pull on the clothes he’d left stacked as a pillow for Hawkeye.

Hawkeye sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Aw, clothes, no,” he said sadly. The Asset ignored him, his mind already running through just what he’d need to bring back for them to make this place work as a safehouse. Food and clean water, more cleaning supplies, better light than the candles, perhaps something for Hawkeye to lie on other than the table.

“I won’t be long,” he said, starting to strap his weapons back on.

“Unless you get caught,” said Hawkeye, pointedly.

The Asset shook his head. “I won’t get caught,” he said. He couldn’t, because then Hawkeye would be alone, without anyone to protect him from Hydra. 

“Yeah, sure,” said Hawkeye. “Hey, listen, before you go fucking off, can I at least have your name?”

The Asset went very still. A name. He must have had one once, before Hydra burnt it out of him. When he’d come to this place and watched the dancing, people would have called him by something.

He stretched for it, going over every tiny fragment of memory that had come back to him, but it was nothing but a handful of tiny scraps, nothing that gave him any information.

He shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said.

Hawkeye stared at him. “Oh shit man, I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s- They can really take that much from you?”

“They’ll take everything,” said the Asset, and his voice sounded thick in a way he didn’t quite recognise, “if they find you. But I won’t let that happen.”

It felt as if something was caught in his throat as he spoke, as he pictured Hawkeye having everything stripped away from him the way the Asset had.

“Okay man,” said Hawkeye softly. “Yeah, okay. I’m gonna stay safe here, don’t- You don’t have to worry, okay?”

There was something wet on the Asset’s face. He took a deep breath and wiped it away, squaring his shoulders. “I will return shortly,” he said, because he had a mission, and he needed to focus on that.

Hawkeye nodded. “Okay, see you soon,” he said.

The Asset hesitated, feeling as if he should be making some other gesture in farewell, then jerked his head in a nod and headed out.

He moved the safe from in front of the door, then paused before he went through. Hawkeye had said he’d stay, but the Asset wasn’t so naive that he believed him. If he came back and Hawkeye was gone, he’d have to track him down before Hydra did. A shot of fear ran down his spine at just the idea of Hawkeye being outside without the Asset to protect him.

He shut the door behind him, all too aware of the broken lock on it, then went up to the trapdoor and carefully made his way out. He shut it behind him, pulling the trash that had covered it back into place, then dragged the nearest dumpster over the top. It was heavy enough that even Hawkeye’s impressive shoulder muscles wouldn’t be able to lift it from underneath.

And they were impressive. He found his mind lingering on them as he ducked back down the alleyway, which was strange. He hadn’t even realised he’d paid that much attention to them.

It was still very early and most of the city was quiet. The Asset easily avoided the handful of people moving around, then found a clothes store and broke in, short-circuiting the alarm system and grabbing a sweater and a coat to put on over his combat gear so he’d blend in better. He found himself taking a hoodie for Hawkeye as well, one large enough to hang loose on his frame, made of a soft fabric that the Asset couldn’t help stroking his fingers over.

It made sense to get it, even if it hadn’t been part of the mission parameters he’d set himself. The basement was cold, and Hawkeye only had his combat outfit.

With that thought, he broke into the housewares store next door as well, filling a bag with blankets and cushions before slipping back out and heading off to find a grocery shop. If they were going to stay down there for a while, he wanted to make it comfortable for Hawkeye.

****

When he arrived back at the basement he had two bags of supplies in his hands and a backpack he’d stolen along the way. The dumpster and the trash were all still in place, but it looked as if they might have shifted a little, and when he made it down into the trapdoor, he could see the door at the bottom was ajar when he knew he’d left it shut.

Apprehension rose up in his stomach, cold and sour, even though he knew it was most likely just Hawkeye investigating their surroundings.

He jogged down the stairs, anticipation pumping through him as images passed through his mind of Hydra waiting for him with Hawkeye in chains, or even just them having left Hawkeye’s body lying on the table where they’d been pack together, blood dripping to the floor, or maybe…

The bar was still half-lit by flickering candles, and there were no signs that anyone else had been there, but there was also no sign of Hawkeye. The Asset dropped his bags and moved into the room, reaching for a gun, and then…

A wolf trotted out from behind the bar and sat back on his haunches, grinning at the Asset with a lolling tongue. The Asset paused still for a moment, relief rolling through him, then tucked his gun back away.

“You are safe,” he said.

The wolf - Hawkeye - rolled his eyes, then got back up to come over and nose at the bags the Asset had bought. He had mousy-blond fur, the same colour as Hawkeye’s hair, and was large enough to come up to the Asset’s chest with powerfully-built shoulders and haunches. He was still wearing the collar around his neck, although it didn’t hang as loose as when he was a human. The Asset wondered what he was like to face in a fight in this form, and then what it might be like to change forms and curl up with him while they were both wolves, nestled close together amongst the blankets he had brought back.

The idea hit him like a sledgehammer, dazzling him with just how good it would be to share that with Hawkeye, to not just be cuddled up with him like they had been earlier, but to get to share being a wolf with him.

No one in Hydra had been a wolf. They’d treated that part of the Asset like just another weapon in his arsenal, a skill they could use for their own purposes. Just looking down at the way Hawkeye was sniffing at the food the Asset had brought, tail wagging as he went through the bags, was making the Asset realise that being a wolf was more than that. It was a part of who he was that came with its own wants and needs.

Needs like getting to spend time with other wolves, or being snuggled up close to his packmate.

Hawkeye found a packet of bagels and pulled it out of the bag, dropping it at his paws and grinning up at the Asset.

He was happy because of something the Asset had done. Because he’d provided for him. An unfamiliar surge of pleasure filled the Asset’s chest, and he found himself smiling down at Hawkeye. “There’s chips as well,” he said, and Hawkeye wriggled with delight, then sat back on his haunches and gave the Asset an expectant look.

It was like nothing the Asset had felt before, to be able to unpack the bags and show what he’d brought to Hawkeye. Surely this level of emotion couldn’t just be because they were packmates? He’d never felt the urge to provide for the Hydra agents he fought alongside, after all.

He’d stolen some electric camping lanterns from an outdoors shop that he set around to replace the candles before setting the food out on the table he’d scrubbed, then looked back at Hawkeye. “Are you eating as a wolf?” he asked.

Hawkeye took a couple of steps backwards, shaking himself as he transformed back into a man.

A naked man.

The Asset had known he would be naked when he shifted back, he wasn’t sure why it felt like a surprise. He found himself looking over Hawkeye’s body as if checking for weapons, but he knew he didn’t have any. He just wanted to run his eyes over Hawkeye’s body, apparently just to take it in. It wasn’t an urge he could remember having before.

His shoulders were even more impressive without a shirt covering them.

When he looked back at Hawkeye’s face, he was wearing a smug look. “Guess they didn’t manage to burn that out of you,” he said, which didn’t make much sense. He reached to his collar and opened the pocket, pulling out his hearing aids, and suddenly it made sense that he’d have one. Not all injuries carried over between forms, so if Hawkeye could hear as a wolf, he’d want some way to keep his hearing aids close to him for when he changed back.

The Asset pulled his eyes away and waved a hand at the table. “Time to eat,” he said, once Hawkeye had his aids settled in his ears and switched on.

“Sure,” agreed Hawkeye, and he wandered over to the stack of his clothes that he’d left on the bench. “I’ll share your food with you, man.”

That felt like some sort of formula that the Asset should recognise, but he was too distracted by Hawkeye pulling on his underwear, and only his underwear, to try and work it out. He came back to sit at one of the wooden stools the Asset had found and cleaned off for them, grinning at the food on the table and grabbing for the bottle of soda, and the Asset felt an unfamiliar thrill of satisfaction. He’d brought all this back for Hawkeye, he’d provided for him, and now they were going to share it.

Like a proper pack.

“Did you see any sign of Hydra out there?” Hawkeye asked as he put together a bagel with the meat and cheese the Asset had also brought back.

“There was a helicopter,” said the Asset. “And I saw someone on a rooftop. I can’t confirm that either were Hydra, but the possibility is high.”

He’d remembered helicopters coming for him, circling overhead as he ran and ran and couldn’t escape them.

“Shit,” said Hawkeye, staring at him with shock. “Seriously?”

The Asset frowned at him. “I told you they would be searching.”

“Yeah, but…” said Hawkeye, then made a face. “Just, I don’t know. It didn’t feel real.”

“It is real,” said the Asset, fixing him with a glare and wondering how he was going to get the danger through to him. “Very real. We need to be very careful.” He gestured at the bags he’d brought. “There is enough here for several days. We will stay here as long as possible.”

“Fuck,” said Hawkeye, tiredly. “That makes sense but, damn, this isn’t exactly the ideal safehouse.” He took a bite of his bagel and the Asset felt a weird thrill. _He’s eating my food_ , he thought, which made no sense. Why would that make him so happy?

There was silence for a few minutes as they ate, then Hawkeye asked, “How’d you find the place, anyway? I can’t imagine anyone’s been here for decades.”

The Asset frowned around at the bar again, and remembered the sound of music. “I used to come here,” he said softly. “I danced here.”

Hawkeye snorted. “No way. The records in the office end in 1942. Maybe your grandpa came here, no way you did.”

1942\. The Asset groped for the current year and came up blank. He’d been frozen more often than he’d been awake for a while, he had no idea what year it was, or how much time had passed since he’d come to this place to drink and dance.

He still didn’t even know which city they were in. “Hydra kept me in storage when they didn’t need me,” he said stiffly. “I don’t know how long it’s been.”

Hawkeye was giving him a soft, sad look that made the Asset uncomfortable. He itched to hide away from it, keep all his deficiencies and vulnerabilities hidden away.

That wasn’t how pack worked, though. He may not remember much but he could feel the truth of that in his bones. You shared everything with pack. He couldn’t keep secrets from someone who belonged to him as thoroughly as Hawkeye’s scent made it clear he belonged to the Asset.

“It’s 2003,” said Hawkeye carefully.

The Asset stared at him. “No,” he said, because that couldn’t be true, he couldn’t have lost so much time to the chair and cryostasis. “No, it can’t-” His voice gave out as he considered the changes to the world that he’d gotten used to ignoring every time he’d been sent on a mission. The changes in technology, the new fashions, the buildings that had appeared as if overnight.

“No,” he said again, and his voice was hoarse with horror. How had Hydra taken so much from him? How had he just stood there and let them?

“Sorry, man,” said Hawkeye, and he reached out to set his hand on the Asset’s arm. “Do you remember when they got you?”

The Asset shook his head. “I remember nothing,” he said, then cleared his throat because it felt like it was closing up again. “I was...I had a life. I came here, I remember that, remember dancing and, and-” There had been a man. He’d handed the Asset a drink with a flirty smirk that the Asset couldn’t imagine being aimed at him.

“I was in a uniform,” he remembered. “Army, I was Army.” He frowned, clenching his jaw as if he could squeeze the memories out like that, but nothing further came to him. He shook his head.

“Okay,” said Hawkeye, still sounding gentle. “Well, that’s more than before, right? Seems like you’re getting bits back, you’ve just got to give it time.”

The Asset snorted. “Seems like I already gave Hydra a whole load of time,” he muttered, rubbing at his forehead.

“You’re not going to give them anything else,” said Hawkeye with a certainty the Asset envied. “We’ll stay holed up down here, then get out and get you free and clear. They won’t get you back.”

The Asset felt far more focused on them not getting Hawkeye, but he nodded, because the easiest way to make sure Hydra didn’t get Hawkeye was to make sure they didn’t get him either, so he could keep him safe.

****

After they’d eaten the Asset packed away their food and then considered the bar again. The brighter light from the lanterns was making it clear that it was still a mess, so he pulled out the cleaning supplies he’d brought.

“Seriously?” asked Hawkeye, stretching. “I was just gonna nap, man. I can’t imagine you got much sleep last night.”

The Asset looked back at him, taking in the lazy sprawl of his limbs and the easy contentment on his face from having eaten. The idea of a nap with him, curling up together to sleep off the meal, was extremely appealing.

But not on the table.

“Give me a moment,” he said, turning back to his bags.

He chose the booth furthest from the door, the one with a wide semicircle of padded seating that didn’t look too badly rotten. He pulled out a couple of sheets and spread them over the seats, to protect the two of them from the dirt encrusted in the fabric, then added the cushions and blankets he’d stolen, arranging them until he’d created what looked like the most comfortable space for two wolves that he could manage under the circumstances.

When he looked around for Hawkeye, he was already a wolf again. He came over and pressed his nose to the Asset’s hand, giving him a look the Asset didn't know how to decipher before leaping up into the space, turning around a couple of times, moving a cushion slightly over, then settling down with a happy sound that made something in the Asset’s chest want to crack open.

He’d created a space for Hawkeye that he liked. He took a moment to just watch how Hawkeye rested his head down on his paws, clearly settling in for a nap. He was safe and comfortable, and the Asset had given him that.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling this satisfied after a completed mission.

Hawkeye looked over at him and made an unmistakable beckoning gesture with his head.

The Asset nodded. “I’m coming,” he said, because there was no way he could keep away from the invitation.

He took the time to check the door one last time, making sure they were safe down here, then went back and took off his clothes so he could shift to a wolf and pad over to leap up beside Hawkeye. He wasn’t sure how close he could get to him without it being too much, even while all his instincts were shouting for him to get as close as possible and fill his nose with Hawkeye’s scent again, take in all the warm, safe feelings of pack that he still didn’t understand. God, he wanted them so much though.

Apparently Hawkeye wasn’t happy with that, because he shifted closer to the Asset, nudging him with his nose until they were curled up together, just as close as the Asset had wanted to be. The comfortable relaxation of having Hawkeye - of having his pack - so close where he could keep him safe settled into the Asset’s muscles, bleeding all the tension out until he settled into that calm, half-asleep state.

A few minutes later, Hawekeye let out a whuffling breath and the Asset realised he’d fallen asleep.

He’d felt safe enough curled up with the Asset to let his guard down far enough to fall asleep.

The enormity of the emotion that washed over the Asset at that realisation was more than he could ever remember feeling before, and he found his resolve that nothing would ever hurt Hawkeye strengthening. He’d do anything and everything he could to keep him safe.

****

“Hey, good news!” called Hawkeye from the office, where he’d been poking around. “I found a pack of cards!” He came out with the cards held up.

The Asset looked at them, then back at Hawkeye. He was wearing the sweater that the Asset had stolen for him. When he’d pulled it on, the complicated emotions in the Asset’s chest that he was slowly starting to identify had been briefly overwhelmed by a sense of possessiveness. That was his packmate, wearing the clothing the Asset had picked out for him, after sleeping in the blankets the Asset had arranged for him.

“C‘mon, man, don’t go giving me that blank look,” said Hawkeye, heading over to the table. “Put a pause on the den mother thing and play a game with me.”

The Asset was midway through scrubbing the bar clean using the supplies he’d brought in. He’d already swept and scrubbed the floor and gone back over the table now he had the right supplies for it.

“Den mother?” he repeated.

“Yeah, you know,” said Hawkeye, sitting down and taking the cards out to start shuffling. “The cleaning everything and making comfy blanket nests and all that.”

The Asset looked back down at the cloth he was scrubbing with. “I just want the place to be comfortable.”

Hawkeye paused his shuffling to give him a careful look. “Dude, you’re denning harder than a pack leader who just found out one of his packmates is injured. You didn’t realise?”

The Asset didn’t have an answer for that. He set down the cloth he was using and looked around at the bar again. It had just made sense for him to clean, and to build a warm, safe place for Hawkeye to sleep in. It had made him feel like he was doing something useful, as if he was providing for him.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” said Hawkeye. “I didn’t stop to think that you wouldn’t know that kinda wolf stuff anymore if they took all your memories from you.”

The Asset forced himself to walk over to sit down opposite Hawkeye. “They made me a wolf,” he said. “I’ve never known anything about it.”

“You’ve never had a pack?” asked Hawkeye. “What about the wolf who bit you?”

The Asset shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. He racked his brains, thinking that he must have at least some memories of no longer being human, of turning into a wolf for the first time, but nothing came to him. 

“Fuck,” said Hawkeye, and he reached out to take the Asset’s hand, squeezing it tightly without seeming to realise that it was his metal one. “I’m sorry. No wonder you’ve been doing all these packbonding things with me.”

The Asset clung on to his hand, relishing the contact. “I’ve known other wolves,” he said, because he knew he had. He had faint memories of other targets who had been wolves, and working with a handful of STRIKE team members who had carried the scent of it. None of them had made him react like Hawkeye’s scent did. “It’s not-” He hesitated, but made himself finish the sentence. “It’s not felt like this before.”

“Being a wolf is a lot of instincts that don’t always make sense,” said Hawkeye. “If you haven’t had a pack to help explain shit to you, I should imagine you’ve been confused over a lot of it.” He shrugged. “It’s not like there’s a lot of reliable information out amongst the humans. Everything I learnt about it came from my pack.”

“You have a pack,” the Asset realised, and then he wondered why it was a surprise. Of course a wolf like Hawkeye would already have a pack.

“Yeah,” agreed Hawkeye. “It’s not very big, just the wolf that turned me and another guy who I guess is our pack leader, but I don’t know that a pack has to be big to be complete.” He paused, then added in a careful voice, “I trust them completely. They both work for SHIELD, I could-”

“No,” said the Asset immediately, not letting him finish. “No handlers. No SHIELD. It’s not safe.”

Hawkeye sighed. “Technically only one of them is a handler.”

“No,” said the Asset again. “If Hydra knows you’re close to them, they’ll be watching them, waiting for you to contact them.”

Hawkeye made a face. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Just, it sucks. They’re gonna be worrying about me.”

“Worrying won’t hurt them,” said the Asset. “Hydra will.”

There was a horrible sour feeling in his stomach, and he couldn’t tell if it was from the idea of Hydra getting hold of Hawkeye’s pack and hurting them, or because of the creeping realisation that if Hawkeye already had a pack, he didn’t need the Asset. What would he do if he rescued him from Hydra, if he kept him safe and got him away, and Hawkeye didn’t want him as pack but just wanted to go back to his existing one?

The Asset thought about going back to being alone and just the idea of it made his gut hurt. Hawkeye was his. His pack, his comrade, just his. He couldn’t give him up.

“Okay, fine,” said Hawkeye, picking the cards back up. “We’ll do it your way. Now, are we gonna play Go Fish or poker?”

“I don’t know either of those games,” said the Asset. He cast his mind back, trying to remember playing cards and a sudden image came to him of sitting by a campfire in the woods, huddled with a few other guys with a rifle beside him, playing cards.

He took a deep breath and Hawkeye gave him a concerned look.

“I remembered something,” he said. “I was...I think I was in a war.”

Hawkeye nodded and started dealing cards. “Makes sense,” he said. “You said you were in the army, right? And I’m guessing Hydra wouldn’t have picked someone who hadn't seen combat for an asset.”

“They called me ‘soldat’,” said the Asset, softly. “The Winter Soldier.”

Hawkeye’s hands paused, then he carried on dealing. “Yeah, I thought that might be you,” he said, more casually than the Asset thought he was feeling. “Funny, nothing in the files said you were brainwashed. Or Hydra’s.”

“Hydra controls the information,” said the Asset. He picked up the cards and looked at them, and then looked up at Hawkeye. “I have no idea how to play.”

“The key is just to always let me win,” said Hawkeye, grinning at him.

“Is that the only way you can beat someone?” asked the Asset. “By taking advantage of an amnesiac?”

Hawkeye shrugged. “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s that or taking my shirt off to dazzle you with my abs, and it’s kinda cold in here for that.”

The Asset couldn’t stop his eyes from glancing down at Hawkeye’s stomach, covered by the sweater, then back up to his face to see a knowing look. “Explain the rules to me, Hawkeye,” he said. “Or I will return to the cleaning.”

Hawkeye rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay, fine,” he said. “And, hey, you can call me Clint, you know.”

Clint. The Asset thought about Hawkeye’s file and the tiny amount of personal information that he hadn’t paid too much information to, because he’d been focused on his skills and experience. “Clinton Francis Barton,” he remembered. He hadn’t stopped to consider using his real name rather than his callsign.

But he wasn’t a target any more. He was pack.

Hawkeye winced. “Aw man, not the full thing,” he said. “And definitely not ‘Francis’, seriously.”

The Asset nodded. “Clint, then,” he said, and looked back at his cards. “Explain the rules.”

Clint grinned at him. “It’s pretty simple,” he said, and the Asset got caught on staring at his smile and watching the way his eyes lit up.

_Being a wolf is a lot of instincts that don’t always make sense_ , Clint had said. Nothing about the Asset’s reactions to him had made any sense, not from that first moment he’d caught his scent.

He wasn’t sure it could all be explained by pack feelings, though. That couldn’t explain the way the Asset got caught on Clint’s physical appearance, or the way his chest glowed whenever Clint smiled. He thought back to that memory of playing cards in the woods, to the other soldiers around him. He could remember how he’d felt about them, comradeship and affection, and it wasn’t anything close to the tangle that he felt for Clint.

He hadn’t been a wolf back then, of course. Maybe this was what pack felt like. Maybe this was what Clint felt for his pack, those two SHIELD agents that the Asset couldn’t help feeling horribly jealous of. 

They weren’t here right now though. The Asset was the one Clint was sitting across from, explaining the rules to this game. He could be a normal person for long enough to give Clint this, right?

Except, after a couple of hands, it began to feel like he couldn’t. He did his best to relax into the easy give-and-take of the game, but somehow he couldn’t stop himself from flinching whenever he lost a round. He had too many memories of times when failure meant pain, when losing came before a punishment. Even having to tell Clint to ‘go fish’ felt like he was letting him down by not having the right resources available.

“Hey, we can stop if you like,” said Clint after the fourth hand, when the Asset lost again and hunched over in anticipation of pain he knew wasn’t coming, but couldn’t seem to stop waiting for. “This is meant to be fun but it seems like you’re not enjoying it.”

The Asset made himself sit up straight. Clint wanted to share this with him, wanted to have a good time with him despite the situation, despite Hydra coming after them both, and the Asset was ruining it. “Deal again,” he snapped.

Clint paused, then carefully set the cards down. “Nope.”

“Deal,” growled the Asset, frustration coming out in his voice as anger. He was trying so hard to be what Clint needed right now, a comrade, some kind of replacement for his pack, how was he failing so badly?

“Okay, yelling at me never really works,” said Clint, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve disappointed way too many handlers to be phased by shouting, sorry.”

The Asset clenched his jaw, staring down at the pack of cards, then he snatched them up himself and started dealing. “You wanted to play,” he said. “We’re playing.”

“I wanted to find a way to pass the time that we’d both enjoy,” corrected Clint. “Clearly you’re too much of a competitive son-of-a-bitch for that, though, because you are not taking losing at all well and let me tell you, I’m not the kinda guy who’s going to lose on purpose just to stop you smashing the table or whatever else you’re working up to, so-”

“No,” said the Asset, setting the cards down. “That’s not-” He broke off, frustration crashing over him again. He was ruining this. Clint wasn’t smiling any more and that was the Asset’s fault. “I don’t need to win,” he said. “I just...” He scowled down at the cards, searching for words. In the end, he fell back on reciting what his handlers had always told him. “Failure is not allowed. There are no excuses. If you can’t succeed at every mission there is no use for you. If you are less than perfect you will be punished.”

“Oh,” said Clint, very quietly, and he sat forward. “Hey, that’s not-”

The Asset fixed him with a glare, because he _knew_ that wasn’t going to happen here, but that didn’t stop him waiting for it.

Clint pressed his lips together. “The point of playing cards isn’t winning or losing,” he said. “Losing isn’t failing the mission. All you’ve got to do to succeed is pass an hour and still be smiling at the end. No one’s keeping score beyond that, I promise.”

The Asset considered that. He couldn’t remember managing a smile for a whole hour, or at all, really, although he knew he must have, once upon a time when he was a regular guy. That mission sounded even harder than taking a 500 foot shot through a window across two rooftops in a howling gale, but he was willing to give it a try.

“Okay,” he said, and picked up the cards he’d dealt. He glanced down at them, then back at Clint and tried out a small smile. It felt unfamiliar, but like something he could get used to aiming at Clint. “Let’s do this.”

“Yeah,” said Clint, and he sounded a little breathless, his eyes lingering on the Asset’s mouth for a moment before he picked up his own cards.

Things went easier after that. Any time the Asset lost a hand, he just smiled at Clint and gathered the cards back up, and it wasn’t long before Clint was grinning back, his smile getting wider with every round and lighting up his eyes. God, he really was beautiful; the Asset had never realised a person could be so beautiful. He’d never really noticed things like that before, but it was starting to feel like he couldn’t stop noticing it about Clint.

He even started to win rounds as he got more used to the game, which made Clint roll his eyes and start muttering about creating a monster.

“Maybe we should be betting on this,” said the Asset as he won another round.

Clint snorted. “Betting what? Handfuls of dust? Cleaning supplies? Bottles of booze from the forties that will almost certainly turn us blind?”

A memory flooded back to the Asset, of sitting at this exact table when the gas lamps had been lit and someone was crooning something soft over on the stage. A man with hair verging closer to ginger than brown had sat down opposite him and handed him a glass, saying, _“The bartender swears it’s not gonna turn us blind, that’s good enough for me, James.”_

The Asset pulled in a deep breath, looking around the bar again with wide eyes, remembering sitting here back when it had been new and clean, how the drinks had all had uncertain origins but had been strong enough to make the back of his throat burn, how he’d pulled the guy up after they’d drunk and swayed together, laughing about- about something.

James. He’d called him James.

“Hey man, you okay?” asked Clint, reaching out to put a hand on the Asset’s arm. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I came dancing here,” said the Asset. “There was a fella…” He looked around the bar again, nodding over at a corner that had been dark even back then. “He called me James. We kissed right there.”

“Oh shit,” said Clint, eyes wide, and the Asset suddenly had the horrible feeling that he’d made a mistake. You didn’t tell people that you kissed fellas, you kept that close and secret when you weren’t in this place, unless you wanted a kicking, or to have the cops called, or-

His chest hurt like it was caught in a vice. He froze still, feeling his eyes go wide and then wiping any trace of emotion off his face, sitting still and straight and waiting for whatever judgement was going to come.

“James, huh?” said Clint, looking him over. “Yeah, I guess I can see that.”

He didn’t say anything about the rest of it, just started gathering up the cards to shuffle. The Asset couldn’t move, still waiting for a reaction, but it didn’t seem to be coming.

“I can call you that, right?” asked Clint. “It’s better than ‘hey, man’.”

The Asset let out a long, slow breath. James. It didn’t seem quite right somehow, but it fitted a lot better than any of the titles Hydra had given him. It felt like something a real person might be called.

“Yes,” he said.

Clint grinned at him, then started dealing the next hand, just like that. “Okay, James, then let’s see if your winning streak can keep going.”

The Asset… No. He was done with thinking of himself like that. _James_ just stared at him. “You’re not going to react to the rest of it? Me kissing a guy?”

Clint looked up and shrugged. “Do you want me to?” he said. “I mean, I’m still kinda processing that you were coming here sixty years ago, the gay thing is very much a footnote to that.”

Sixty years. James picked up his cards in a daze, thinking about sixty years lost to Hydra’s brainwashing, and suddenly he was absolutely furious. How dare they take that from him?

And they wanted to take Clint as well. No, hell no. No matter what it took, James was going to keep them both safe. No one was going to lay a finger on either of them again.

Clint cleared his throat. “Plus, ah. It’s not really such a big deal to be gay these days, you know? And you’ve kinda been looking at me in a way that made me think you might be.” 

He gestured vaguely at his chest and James felt himself hunch over at the reminder of how he looked under his shirt, and just how often James had got caught staring. If Clint had had a problem with it, it was likely he’d already have had his head kicked in.

At least there was something he didn’t need to worry about, amidst all the tangled problems of hiding from Hydra, trying to remember who he was and keeping Clint safe.

They played another round of cards, but James was too dazed by the memory and his subsequent realisations to really concentrate, and Clint won easily.

“Okay, there we go,” said Clint, glancing at his watch once they’d finished. “An hour of card playing.” He looked at James as he pulled the cards towards himself. “And, okay, you’re not exactly smiling, but I feel like you had a good time.”

James considered for a moment, thinking about how much more relaxed he was now than he had been when they’d started this. “Yeah, guess so,” he said, then looked at Clint and let a smile form on his face. “That better?”

Clint grinned back, tipping back in his chair and raising his arms above his head in celebration. “Aw yeah, there it is. Mission motherfucking accomplished.”

He held his fist out to James and he just regarded it for a moment, then looked back at Clint.

“You tap your fist against mine,” said Clint, helpfully.

“Why?” asked James.

Clint shrugged. “Solidarity?”

James clenched his hand into a fist and carefully bumped it against Clint’s. “Is this a pack thing?” he asked.

“Nah,” said Clint, relaxing back. “Just a bros thing. Humans do it as well.”

James nodded, taking the cards from Clint and packing them away in their little box. “What do wolves do, then?” he asked, and he could hear the tentativeness he’d wanted to hide in his voice, which meant Clint could as well.

Clint gave him a long, careful look that made James itch to hide from him, because it felt like he could see too much. “What we’ve been doing, mostly,” he said. “Pack cuddles, making a den, sharing food and laughter.”

James nodded, because all those things had appeased the part of him that Hydra had done their best to pretend didn’t exist. It didn’t quite seem like that was all of it though. Somehow it seemed like something was missing, but he couldn’t tell if it was in what they were doing or in James himself, if that part of being a wolf had been burnt out of him along with his memories.

Clint reached a foot under the table to nudge James’s. “Hey, how about we have some food then go wolf and cuddle up again for a nap, huh?”

James couldn’t imagine anything better. “Agreed,” he said, and went to grab the groceries stash.

****

They slept as wolves, pressed together so that Clint’s head rested on James’s paws. James stayed awake for a while, half listening for any sign that Hydra might have found them and half just revelling in the satisfaction of having Clint so close.

He eventually dozed off himself, keeping one ear pricked for any noises. He woke up to a nose pressing against his fur, nestled in against his neck. He should have reacted badly to having someone else so close to him before he was awake enough to know who it was, but even in sleep he recognised Clint’s scent. He wanted to roll onto his back and bare his throat, let Clint get as close as he liked, but there wasn’t the space in their den for that.

Clint nudged him with his nose then moved back, sitting up and grinning down at James with a mischievous look that James wouldn’t have thought would fit on a wolf’s face, but it looked right at home on Clint.

Clint reached out and batted a paw at James’s nose. James shifted back out of the way, scowling at him, but Clint’s grin just grew wider as he moved to do it again. James flicked out his own paw, knocking Clint’s aside, and got up, letting out a half-growl.

Clint jumped down off the seat and backed away a few feet, still grinning, and James watched him, not really sure what was happening.

A second later Clint darted back in, leaping up to gently mouth at James’s neck as he tried to twist out of the way, then backed off again like he was a kid playing tag.

Or a puppy playing, thought James, and had a flash of memory of watching a handful of young wolves playing together through a window, and wanting to go join them. Clint came dashing in again before James could focus on the memory, and he threw himself off the seat, bowling Clint over and setting his own teeth to his neck for a moment before bounding away, letting the thrill of getting to play around settle through him.

James wouldn’t have thought he knew how to play around with another wolf, but it turned out it was as much instinct as anything else because he was able to follow Clint’s lead as they wrestled and chased each other and generally acted like children.

Eventually Clint tired himself out, climbing back into their den to sprawl out, mouth hanging open as he panted and his eyes glittering with pleasure in a way James had to walk away from. It was all too much suddenly, emotions he couldn’t control bursting open in his chest.

He changed back to human and pulled his clothes on, then set about sorting out another meal for them. His mind turned back to the memory of those puppies and he pushed at it, nagging until he had a clearer recollection of it. He’d been in a concrete room, behind one-way glass, watching six or seven young wolves playing around together. He’d wanted to go and be part of their pack, but there had been a handler beside him and just his presence had been enough to restrain him.

The handler had been talking to someone, agreeing that their business was complete and...money, they’d been exchanging money. And then James and the handler had left, and he’d never seen any of those girls again.

His girls.

Fuck. He dropped the bottle of water he’d been holding and collapsed down into a crouch, putting his head in his hands. He’d bitten all those girls. They’d lined up for it, girls just on the edge of becoming teenagers, pulling their shirts aside so he could gently bite their shoulders, just hard enough to draw blood. Some of them had been so scared they’d been crying, but they’d all held still for his teeth.

“Hey, you okay?” asked Clint, and bare feet thumped across the room.

James just kept taking in slow, easy breaths, hiding his face as he tried to put the memory into some sort of context.

A hand tentatively touched his shoulder and then, when he didn’t react, settled more firmly across his back, pulling him in close against Clint. “Hey man, what’s going on?”

James took a deep breath. “You ever turn anyone?” he asked.

“Nope,” said Clint. “Are you...did you remember something?”

James nodded, then lifted his head. “Hydra took me somewhere,” he said carefully, piecing it together as he said it. “Some other organisation. They used me to turn a group of girls, just kids. They were….I think they were teaching them how to kill, how to spy. That kinda thing. They gave Hydra money in return, and then we left. I’ve got no idea what happened to any of them afterwards.” 

Even with all of Hydra’s brainwashing locked into place back then, all he’d wanted had been to stay close to the new wolves, to create a pack with them.

“I didn’t get to be pack with them,” he added, in a tone so quiet he almost hoped Clint didn’t hear it.

“Oh man,” said Clint, and pulled him into a proper hug. James let him, moving to rest his face on Clint’s shoulder, where he could breathe in the reassurance of his scent.

“That sucks,” said Clint softly. “I’m sorry.” He was silent for a moment, then added, “I’ve never bitten anyone, but I can remember how it was when I was first turned. The wolf who bit me stayed close by for a good few weeks, making sure I was okay, helping me out with all the wolfy instincts I didn’t understand. I think there’s an urge there, to take new wolves into your pack. I’m sorry you didn’t get that.”

James shook his head. “I didn’t get any pack,” he said, and his eyes were damp again. “Not with those girls, not with the wolf who turned me, no one. I’ve always been alone.”

“Hey,” said Clint softly. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re not alone now. I’m right here.”

“Yeah,” agreed James. He had a pack now, he had Clint. And there was no way Hydra was going to take that from him like they had everything else.

They stayed in the awkward hug for a few minutes longer, until James felt like he was back under control. He pulled away from Clint with reluctance, and the smile Clint gave him was almost worth losing the comfort of his warmth.

“Come on, let’s have breakfast,” said Clint. “I’m starving.”

James took a deep breath and nodded, standing up. His packmate was hungry; he needed to provide for him.

****

It took two days before Clint started getting really restless. He paced around in wolf form, sniffing at various bits of the bar that James wouldn’t have put his nose anywhere near because of just how much dust there was caked everywhere. Clint always seemed surprised by the inevitable sneeze that came from it, scrubbing at his nose with a paw as if it had betrayed him.

As a human, he took to endlessly shuffling the cards, laying out Solitaire games and then abandoning them to wander around the space again, poking at things, kicking at the safe, then going back to their den to slump back down and stare up at the ceiling.

James was ready for it when he finally spoke up.

“How long do we have to stay down here?”

“As long as it takes.”

Clint sat up and turned to look at him. “But how long’s that gonna be? I mean, you haven’t been up to check for a few days, maybe they’ve already stopped looking around here.”

“No,” said James. He’d sat down at Clint’s laid out Solitaire game and taken over, carefully working through the cards as he chased hazy memories of sitting with a game like this as a kid, waiting for...something. For someone, maybe.

“That’s not really an answer,” said Clint.

“Hydra do not give up,” said James. “They will have left agents around here, they will have hacked into the CCTV to watch for us, they will have moles in the police departments watching out for us. We need to lay low for a while yet.”

He laid out an ace and the memory came clearer. He’d been sitting on a front step, surrounded by tall apartment blocks, waiting for someone to come out to join him.

“Okay,” said Clint, “I get it, man, I get that you’re scared of them-”

“You should be scared too,” said James, not bothering to refute that because he was, he was terrified of Hydra getting hold of him again, and even more petrified of them getting Clint.

Clint waved that off. “Yeah, I get it, okay, big bad brainwashing dickweeds, trust me, I don’t want to run into them. But I don’t want to stay locked up here forever either. Can’t we make a run for it? Get out, steal a car, get far away and then hole up again where they’re not going to be right on top of us?”

“You can’t outrun them,” said James. “They’re everywhere. Right now, they have no idea where we are, no idea this place even exists. It’s the safest place to stay.”

Clint launched himself to his feet. “Okay, that argument made sense three days ago but come on James, how long do you really think we can stay here?”

“We’ve got food and water for another four days,” said James, pulling out a king and moving it to a free space.

He hadn’t finished his game back when he was a kid. The person he’d been waiting for had come out. Another kid, tiny even in the memory, with blond hair. He’d been wrapped up in a scarf and James had tugged on it and laughed at him.

“Oh, no way,” said Clint, pacing across the bar and then back to stand at James’s table. “No fucking way, I am not spending another four days locked in here with nothing to do but play cards, I’m gonna go out of my mind. Come on, you’re a wolf too, you must need to get out and run too.”

James shrugged. “This is a bigger space than Hydra gave me in their bases,” he said, and looked up at Clint. “Than they’d give you once they took you in, tortured you into submission, and made you their puppet.”

Clint let out a sigh and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Aw, come on,” he said tiredly.

“No,” said James again. “We’re not risking it.”

“Isn’t that a decision I get to be part of?” asked Clint. “Feels like you’ve got me imprisoned just as much as they would.”

That hurt, like getting stabbed right in the chest. James just gaped at him for a moment, not able to find words to begin to express just how wrong it was to compare what he was doing to protect Clint with what Hydra would do if they got their hands on him. He wanted Clint _safe_ , he wanted him unhurt and smiling and himself. That was the opposite of what Hydra wanted.

Clint winced at whatever expression was on James’s face, but he didn’t back down. “Okay, that was maybe a bit harsh, but seriously, I’m going to go mad if you keep me locked up for much longer.”

James carefully set the cards he was holding down before he destroyed them by clenching his hand into a fist. “I’m protecting you,” he said. “That’s all I want to do. I’ve got to keep you safe from them. You’re my pack.”

Clint stared at him and then shook his head. “No,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, James, I know things have been rough for you, but we’re not pack. Maybe some day we could be, but it’s not that quick and easy. It takes time, getting to know each other, feeling out the way you fit-”

“No,” interrupted James, because he knew what he felt and he was damned if he was going to let Clint deny it. “No, you’re my pack. I knew the minute I got your scent. You’re mine. And I’m gonna take care of you.”

Clint sighed and rolled his eyes, twitching with restlessness. “I don’t know what you’re smelling, but that’s not how pack works,” he said, and turned as if going to pace around the room again.

James stood up, clenching his hands into fists and drawing Clint’s attention back to him. Anger was surging through him. How dare Clint tell him that what he was feeling wasn't pack, how dare he tell him that he was wrong? James hadn’t ever felt anything like this before, there was nothing else it could be.

“I recognised you,” he said. “Just from your smell. You’re _mine_ , it’s right there! Strong enough to pull me out of decades of brainwashing, to throw me off my mission, to grab you and hide you away instead of turning you over to Hydra, you don’t get to tell me that doesn’t mean anything. You’re _my pack_.”

Clint reared back and James realised his mistake too late. “You were the agent sent to capture me,” said Clint with widening eyes.

James clenched his hands around the edge of the table, but stayed standing tall and straight. “Yes,” he said, because there didn’t seem any point in lying right now. “My mission was to apprehend you on a rooftop, drug you, and take you back to Hydra to be turned into an asset. And I would have done it without question, without hesitation, but I caught your scent and you were so clearly mine that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hand you over to them. That’s how I know you’re pack; nothing else could have thrown off their control of me like that.”

Clint was staring at him with horror and an edge of betrayal, and James had to clench his hands tighter around the table edge, ignoring the creaking of the wood under his left hand.

“You drugged me and locked me up here instead,” Clint said, then shook his head. “James, listen. That’s not pack. Pack is something you build together, it takes months. It takes trust.” He gave James a look that felt like a punch to the sternum. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time, how can I trust you? Pack is knowing exactly who someone is.”

“I don’t know who I am,” said James between gritted teeth. “I was Hydra’s assassin, and that was all I was, and now I’m not even that. The only thing I know beyond that is that you belong with me.”

Clint rubbed a hand over his face and James heard him mutter a curse word to himself. When he dropped his hand, he looked tired and worn down, and James had to fight not to shift into a wolf so that they could curl up together until he looked better.

From the way this conversation was going, James didn’t think that Clint would want that anyway. God, he hoped he got to have that again, he didn’t want to go back to being alone.

“Those girls you talked about before,” Clint said, and that was not at all where James had expected him to go. “The ones they wouldn’t let you form a pack with after you bit them. That was in the Red Room, right?”

James jolted, the words settling into his memory like a key into a lock. “How did you know that?”

Clint crossed his arms. “One of those girls became the next Black Widow when she grew up, then ended up defecting to SHIELD. Well, escaping maybe, I don’t think it counts as defecting when she wasn’t given any choices before then. She got partnered with me for a few missions, including one where we got pinned down with no way out for a human guy, but two wolves were able to sneak away into the woods.” 

He bent down and pulled his pants leg up to reveal the bite mark that James had been vaguely aware of, but hadn’t focus on while Clint was naked because he was constantly distracted by other parts of his anatomy. Now that he was looking at it, he could see that the marks were careful, almost delicate, as if whoever had bitten him hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

“She said that when she was bitten, it was more gentle than she’d been expecting,” said Clint quietly as James stared at it. “She tried to do the same for me.”

James remembered again just how it had felt to put his jaws around the flesh of those girls, all of them so young and scared but bursting with determination not to show it. He wondered how Clint had been when he’d been bitten. The same? Or just eager to escape whatever had been so bad as to make biting him the only way out?

“After she bit me, my scent changed to be more like hers,” said Clint, letting his pants leg drop back down. “That’s how it goes. When you become a wolf and your scent changes to not be human anymore, it takes on some of the person who bit you. So I guess you smelt me and recognised Natasha, and maybe yourself as well.”

James couldn’t stop himself from staring at him, trying to process all that. He remembered that first breath of Clint’s scent and how he’d thought it was his scent.

“It’s not pack,” added Clint softly. “Being pack is like being family: it’s not the genetics or the DNA or who bit who that’s important, it’s spending time and building relationships up and being there for each other. You can’t get it in a couple of days locked in a basement together.”

James felt frozen in place as his mind clogged up trying to process all that. “No,” he said, weakly in denial. “No. You’re mine.”

Clint shook his head. “Sorry, man,” he said. “I really appreciate you helping me out and all that, but that doesn’t make me your property. It doesn’t give you the right to lock me up without letting me have a say in whether or not I can leave.”

He ran his hand through his hair again, then headed away into the office, the only place in the bar where James couldn’t see him.

James sank back down into his chair, staring down at the table but not seeing the cards laid out on it.

He wasn’t imprisoning Clint, he was keeping him safe. There was a difference.

Wasn’t there?

****

Clint came back from the office as a wolf, carefully not meeting James’s eyes as he trotted across the room to the nest of blankets. He jumped up and pulled them around himself, spreading out until it was clear that he didn’t want there to be space for anyone else with him while he slept.

That was fine. James didn’t want to sleep right now anyway. He had too much to think about.

If this warm ball of emotions in his chest wasn’t pack, what was it? How could Clint’s scent have prompted so much in him if it was just that he’d recognised in it the trace of one of those girls he’d bitten?

That couldn’t be it. Could it?

He took a deep breath, hunching over, then glanced at the shape of Clint, listening to him breathe for a moment. If the emotions he had for him weren’t because they were pack, what were they?

He shut his eyes and thought back to the handful of brief memories he had. The blond boy he’d been waiting for, the one with the scarf. James could remember smiling at him, remember a rough kind of affection. There was some of that in the mix of things he felt for Clint, but it wasn’t quite right.

He thought of the redhead he’d kissed in this bar, the heat in the pit of his stomach as he’d pushed him back against the wall, the way it had felt when he’d made him laugh.

That seemed closer. And James could imagine pushing Clint up against the wall and kissing him, could imagine the feel of his lips and the broad planes of his chest against James’s.

James let out a quiet sigh, and looked back at Clint, who had fallen asleep.

Was that it, then? Attraction? No, there was affection as well, protectiveness, jealousy at the idea of his pack being allowed close to him when James wasn’t and just a bone-deep ache of want that James didn’t know how to categorise.

Oh.

Was it love? 

Love. James sat and considered that for a long time, trying to get his head around the idea that he was capable of an emotion that strong. The more he thought about it, the better it fitted with how he felt.

He loved Clint. That was why he had to keep him safe.

Except…

_“If you love someone, you have to give them the freedom to be themselves,”_ said the warm voice of a woman in his memory.

James couldn’t keep Clint locked up here, no matter how safe it was. That wasn’t what love was.

He sat for another few hours, listening to Clint’s quiet breathing, but no matter how he tried to frame it he couldn’t escape that truth. 

It was early enough that dawn wouldn’t have been lightening the sky outside yet. He went to the remaining food and the other items he’d stolen and started dividing them up, putting the majority of the food and most of the clothes he’d taken into the backpack. He squashed it all down to fit in as much as he could, then went to the blanket nest to carefully pull out one of the blankets.

Clint lifted his head and blinked at him, and James carefully didn’t meet his gaze as he walked back to finish packing the stuff up.

He put the few bits he couldn’t fit into the backpack into a carrier bag for himself and then, after a moment’s hesitation, added the pack of cards. It wasn’t much as far as a momento went, but it was all he had.

He glanced over his shoulder at where Clint was still a wolf, sitting up to watch him. “Get dressed,” he said, then looked away so he didn’t stare as Clint shifted back to human.

“What’s going on?” asked Clint.

“Get dressed,” James repeated, because he didn’t think he could have this conversation if Clint were naked. He chose one of his guns and a knife, and added them to the backpack, because if he wouldn’t be there to protect Clint, he could at least give him some weapons.

Clint let out a sigh. “Do this, do that,” he muttered to himself. “Like being at work.” 

James could hear the sound of clothes being pulled on though, so he kept his mouth shut as he fastened the backpack, hefting it and trying to judge if it were too heavy for an unenhanced wolf. Clint had thick muscles though, he’d be okay.

He picked it up and turned to set it on the table in front of Clint.

“Here,” he said. “That’s everything you’ll need. Don’t trust anyone but your pack, don’t go into SHIELD, avoid CCTV, police, anyone that might have surveillance. Don’t use any safe houses, bank accounts or IDs that SHIELD might know about because if SHIELD knows, Hydra knows. Stay out of major cities.”

Clint stared at him. “You’re letting me go?”

James shrugged. “It’s not my choice,” he said. “You want to go, you go. You were right that I shouldn’t imprison you, I just-” His voice cracked with emotion and he had to stop and pull himself back together, wondering where his mask had gone. Hydra had spent years training that into him, how had he lost it so easily? “Just don’t let them get you,” he said. “Please. I couldn’t bear it if they hurt you.”

Clint nodded, looking serious. “I won’t. Hey, I know I kinda seem like a goof, but I’m good at this, I promise. I’ve got a few places that no one else knows about, I can go to ground.”

James nodded. “Good,” he said, and then didn’t know what else to say. Clint bent to lace up his boots and he found himself just staring, taking in the shape of him one last time before he left and James was alone again.

Or for the first time, because he wasn’t going to have Hydra either. Or at least, he wouldn’t have them right next to him, whispering in his ear. Hopefully he’d have them behind him. He was going to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction, leaving a trail that would hopefully keep Hydra busy chasing him rather than Clint, and then… And then. Maybe he’d find his own place to hole up. He guessed it depended on how well he was able to stay ahead of Hydra.

Clint stood up and threw his sweater on, the sweater James had bought him, then picked up the backpack and lifted it onto his back. He moved easily under it, so the weight must have been okay.

James turned away and went to drag the safe away from the door, opening it for Clint and then stood backwards and waved at the stairs. “It’ll be dark out still. Turn left out the alleyway, there’s cameras the other way.”

Clint nodded and stepped to the foot of the stairs, then hesitated and glanced back at James. His eyes caught on the den James had made, the sheets and blankets that he was going to bundle up and take with him, because Clint’s scent clung to them and he couldn’t bring himself to leave that behind just yet, not when it was still the only thing that would break his brainwashing.

Clint stared at them for a long moment, then looked back at James. “Are you coming? I know a much better place to den up.”

It took James several moments to process that, caught in surprise that Clint would even offer.

Clint started to raise an eyebrow in query and James found himself stumbling over words. “Yes, yes, please, just let me…”

He turned away to grab his own stuff, bundling the blankets up and shoving them in the bag, turning the lanterns out but leaving them where they were, then hurrying back to where Clint was patiently waiting for him.

“Ready,” he said.

His eyesight was good enough to catch Clint’s grin in the dark as it spread over his face, slow and wide. “Cool,” he said, then turned to head up the stairs.


	3. Chapter 3

Dawn was starting to dimly light the sky as they crept down the alley and turned left. James kept his eyes up high, watching the rooftops, but it didn’t seem like anyone was up there. There was no way Hydra had given up the search, but maybe, just maybe, they’d relaxed their efforts right in this area, figuring they’d have run before now.

The thought didn’t make the feeling that Hydra could swoop down on them at any moment fade at all.

“There’s a parking lot up this way,” said Clint as they walked down the street, trying to look like they fitted right in there while keeping out of the streetlights. “We can steal a car.” He made a face. “Kinda thought I was past doing that sorta thing.”

James angled his face down and away from the road as a car passed by. “Our need is greater than the owner’s,” he said.

“Yeah,” agreed Clint, but he still didn’t sound happy about it.

The parking lot was sparsely populated, but there was enough choice for Clint to glance around a couple of times, clearly checking out their options.

“That one,” said James, nudging him towards the oldest car in the lot, because that would be the easiest to hotwire. Plus the cheaper the car, the less likely someone was going to put a lot of effort into getting it back.

“Nope,” said Clint, and headed for a mid-range Ford instead. “People who own cars like that can’t afford to lose them. That’s a desperation car. This one, though, this is so generic even the owner will forget about it after a week.”

James turned so that his body hid what Clint was doing as he broke into the car, glancing around. Other than a woman passing by, her head down and her shoulders hunched, the area was deserted, but the knot of fear in his stomach that Hydra were watching and just waiting for their moment to attack only seemed to be clenching tighter.

Clint got the car open and they slipped inside, piling their bags on the back seat. James pulled out one of his guns and kept it resting on his lap as Clint hotwired the car.

“If someone sees that, it’s going to attract attention,” he said as the engine turned over.

“No one will see it,” said James, not taking his eyes off the shadows.

“Sure,” said Clint, sounding amused. They pulled out of the parking lot and turned right, and James had the worst disconnect when he realised he still had no idea where they were, or even which compass direction they were driving in.

Hydra had never told him where he was. When they moved him he’d just followed behind without question, just waiting for the next order. It hadn’t mattered where he was, only what the mission was. This strange sense of dissociation as he tried to build a picture of the world around them was new.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Which city?”

Clint’s expression was startled when he darted a look towards James. “You don’t know? You knew that bar.”

James gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t remember,” he said, and wondered how long he’d have to keep saying that. How many of his memories would creep back if he stayed out of Hydra’s hands? Just a few glimpses like he’d had so far, or would it all eventually come back?

He wasn’t sure what would be worse, never knowing who he was or knowing exactly what they’d taken from him.

“We’re in Brooklyn Heights,” said Clint, softly. “By the docks.”

“Brooklyn,” repeated James, and the word seemed to evoke a feeling with it, of comfort and nostalgia. “New York?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Clint, and he still sounded gentle in a way James couldn’t cope with right now, so instead he kept his eyes out the window, half looking for Hydra and half trying to spot something he recognised.

None of it looked familiar.

“You know, you kinda have a Brooklyn accent sometimes,” added Clint. “When you’re emotional.”

James had no idea what to do with that, so he carefully ignored it.

“We need to leave the city,” he said.

“Yep,” agreed Clint. “Gonna get as far away as possible, don’t worry. Hydra won’t have the first clue where to look for us.”

James hoped like hell that was true.

****

It was a long few days before they got to Clint’s safehouse. They drove all the way down to Kentucky, then backtracked to North Carolina before turning around to run straight through to Kansas. James had thought they were heading for the west coast, but they turned north from there, all the way up to South Dakota.

They stopped driving just long enough to sleep every night. They didn’t stay in their latest car to sleep, they packed up all their stuff and got a mile or two away before finding a hidden place to curl up in as wolves. A patch of woodland with a handful of bushes growing close enough together for them to be out of sight when they squeezed into the middle. An abandoned warehouse with some rusted machinery they could creep behind. A farm with a barn far enough out from the main house that no one noticed two dark shadows creeping in after dark, and leaving before dawn.

Now that James knew that what he felt for Clint was love, he could tell that it was seeping into everything they did. He found himself sitting in the car, watching Clint’s face as he concentrated on the road, or half-sang along with the radio, and wanting to imprint it so deeply in his memory that Hydra wouldn’t be able to touch it even if they did get him back. When he woke up every morning, his head resting on Clint’s fur, all he could think about was waking up this way for the rest of his life.

Or perhaps waking up cuddled against Clint when they were both humans, feeling warm skin under his hand instead of fur. For all they were physically close as wolves, though, Clint kept his distance when they were human. James figured that he didn’t want to get too close to Hydra’s assassin and tried to tell himself that it made sense, despite the cold pit of sadness it gave him.

Clint did all the driving, able to keep going for hours and hours without needing a pause. They ditched their car every time they hit a large enough town, walking for a while before stealing a new one. Sometimes Clint drove in the wrong direction for an hour or so before they changed cars, then they drove back again in the new one. It made their progress pretty slow, but James was relieved that Clint seemed to be taking this seriously, doing everything he could to cover their tracks.

At one point Clint even took them to a bus station and they got the bus for a couple of hours, but James didn’t like that. Too many strangers, all too close for comfort. Any of them could have pulled a weapon and attacked Clint at any moment, and if they’d moved fast enough, James wouldn’t be able to protect him from getting hurt.

They stuck to cars after that, although James caught Clint giving a train a thoughtful look as they passed through Nebraska.

“If you were really around in the ‘30s, you musta jumped a freight train at least once, right? All the movies have that in.”

James watched the train rattling by and felt a weird shudder of fear pass through him, as if he were looking at some deadly weapon rather than a handful of freight carriages running along a rail. “No trains.”

Clint gave him a careful look that meant James hadn’t managed to keep the note of fear out of his voice, but he just shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and they carried on driving through Nebraska, stopping for the night in Sioux Falls. 

It was a big enough town for James to feel like he could relax slightly. They left their current car in a mall parking lot where it hopefully wouldn’t be noticed for a few days, then started heading along the cluster of motels, restaurants and outlet stores that lined the interstate.

“You gonna freak out if we get a motel?” asked Clint, shifting the backpack on his shoulders. They were still carrying it around with them even now they’d eaten most of the food, mostly because the blankets and cushions had come in useful for building a place to sleep every night. It was getting kinda cold as they got further north. “I really could use a shower.”

James hesitated, looking around at the people passing by, none of whom gave a shit about a couple of tired-looking strangers.

“Somewhere cheap,” he said. “Somewhere that looks like it keeps shitty records.”

Clint brightened up immediately, his mesmerising grin spreading over his face in a way that made James consider maybe staying in a motel every night.

No. He wasn’t going to compromise their safety just to see him smile.

The motel they found was just as cheap as James had hoped, and the guy behind the counter didn’t raise an eyebrow when Clint slipped him a fifty instead of an ID.

They got a room with twin beds and James tried not to think about how that meant they wouldn’t be curled up together overnight.

“We’re ordering pizza,” Clint announced, dumping the bag on one of the beds. “And we’re watching trashy TV. This is not negotiable.”

“Sure,” said James, going to the window to look out. There were better sightlines than he was expecting and he half-drew the curtains to block the room off from an outsider’s glance. There wasn’t a chair in the room so he shifted his bed across so he could sit on it and keep an eye out.

Clint sighed. “You’re going to be on look out all night, aren’t you?”

“Someone’s gotta be,” said James, not looking away from the outside world. “And you need to sleep if you’re gonna be driving tomorrow.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” said Clint but he sounded put out by it, so James glanced over to see his expression, which was tired and a little sad in a way that didn’t make much sense.

“We can’t let our guard down,” he said.

“I know,” said Clint, tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face. “For now, but we should be at the safehouse by midnight tomorrow. You can sleep there, I guess. We’ll need to leave early though.”

James nodded. “I’ll wake you at dawn.”

Clint let out a sigh. “Man, those have to be my least favourite words.”

They ordered pizza and Clint tried to get James interested in a show about baking, and then another about dogs, and seemed disappointed when James didn't get the point of either of them. He was too keyed up to properly watch either of them anyway, sticking close to the window and watching the few people that were around, wondering which of them might be Hydra.

After the dog show, Clint flicked the TV off. “Okay, I’m going to bed,” he said, collapsing backwards onto it. He turned his head to look at James, frowning slightly. “I’m gonna sleep as a human,” he said, carefully.

“Okay,” said James, trying to act as if it didn’t matter to him when the idea of getting to watch Clint’s human face relax into sleep sent a thrill through him.

“That means I’ll be taking my aids out,” added Clint, and suddenly his caution made sense. James hadn’t stopped to consider that Clint might prefer sleeping as a wolf because it meant he could hear if anyone came too close. James had been too caught up on getting to rest his head against Clint’s fur and breathe in his scent every night.

James turned completely away from the window to look at him. “I’ll keep watch,” he promised. “No one’s going to get to you.”

Clint flicked a smile at him. “I know,” he said, and was still smiling as he reached up to take his aids out, carefully placing them on the nightstand. James felt caught in his eyes, unable to keep a smile off his face, and when had those become so easy for him?

About the same time Clint had started trusting him, probably.

James stayed on watch the whole night, keeping an eye out of the window and trying not to look over at Clint’s peacefully sleeping shape too often. It seemed like a miracle that anyone, let alone the guy who knew the Asset had been sent to kill him, would trust him enough to sleep without being able to hear in his presence.

The affection that welled up in James’s chest was almost enough to choke him, until it seemed like if he pressed his hand to his heart, he’d be able to feel it.

****

Clint was sleepy and whiny about it when James woke him the next morning, but he got up at the same time as complaining about it. They gathered their belongings and headed off before the motel’s reception was open, walking over a bridge across the river until they hit a mall, where they stole a car from the sparsely-populated parking lot.

They headed into Michigan, going north as much as east. James thought they were heading for Minneapolis, but Clint took them south again before they got that far. James wondered if that was another detour to throw off any followers, or if they were done heading north for now.

“Are we headed to Canada?” he asked. “Hydra’s up there as well.”

“Nah,” said Clint. “As much as I’d kill for a Tim Horton’s right now, we’re staying in the States.”

They turned southeast down into Iowa, heading back where they came from, and James wondered if they were just going to drive in circles across the country forever. 

If that meant getting to stay this close to Clint, sitting only a couple of feet from him all day and sleeping curled beside him as a wolf at night, he’d take it.

Clint started taking them down a lot of smaller roads, the long, straight kind that meant James could see any other traffic coming from miles away. James wondered if that meant they were getting close, or if he was just trying to cover their tracks a bit better. He’d said they’d reach the safehouse by midnight, but it was still only early evening. They could get a whole heap of miles under their wheels before then.

They turned down a side road into a wildlife reserve, and James found himself frowning.

“Is this a safehouse for humans or wolves?” he asked.

Clint snorted. “Humans, don’t worry. I’m not expecting us to den up in a cave and stay wolf for the foreseeable.”

He drove down to the reserve’s parking lot, then parked in the corner, under a tree. “We are gonna do the last bit on our paws, though,” he said. “It’s just under twenty miles, I figure we can make it by midnight.”

James knew he could make a lot more miles than that as a wolf in a few hours, although he couldn’t remember when he’d found that out. That wasn’t what was making him hesitate. “What about our stuff?”

Clint shrugged. “We’ll have to take most of it and bury it out in the woods before we go wolf, hide it so we’re not leaving any clues.”

“I’m not leaving my weapons,” said James, although he was thinking more of the pack of cards, still carefully tucked away in a side pocket of the backpack.

“We’ve got some plastic bags, you can carry one of those in your mouth,” said Clint, opening his door and climbing out to stretch.

James immediately got out as well, glancing around to make sure no one was paying too much attention to Clint. There weren’t many others around, just a couple of dog owners getting ready for a sunset walk, and a family getting back in their car after what looked to have been a long day.

He had to admit that breaking away from human methods of transport for this bit made sense. If Hydra did ever find their car, or even their stuff, they wouldn’t be able to track two wolves cutting straight across country.

They pulled their stuff out, trying to look like they were going for a hike, and headed off into the woods, breaking away from the paths as soon as they were alone and ducking through the trees until they found a clearing.

Clint started going through the bag. “I don’t think we need any of this,” he said. “There’s plenty of clothes at my house, and bedclothes and shit. It’s just the weapons.”

“And the cards,” said James.

Clint glanced up with a smile. “I’ve got cards at the house as well. And a couple of boardgames.”

James hesitated, thinking about leaving that particular pack, creased and starting to fade, out here in the woods to rot.

“I’m taking them,” he said, pulling out a plastic bag and starting to fill it with his weapons. “Give them here.”

Clint raised an eyebrow, but obligingly handed them over before bundling the rest up. He took out a bag of his own, putting in the knife and gun that James had given him, then started to strip off his clothes.

James did his best not to stare. He’d seen Clint naked a lot over the last few days, but somehow he still found it fascinating. The curves of his muscles, the flat planes of his stomach...James pulled his eyes away and finished packing the things he couldn’t leave behind before stripping off his own clothes.

They dug a small hole and shoved everything they weren’t going to be able to carry in, covering it over with earth and leaves until it was completely hidden.

“Okay,” said Clint, reaching up for his aids. “Just follow me, okay? Should only be a few hours of running.”

James nodded and Clint took his aids out, tucking them away in his collar before transforming down into a wolf. James followed a moment later, then carefully picked up his bag in his mouth and nodded at Clint to show he was ready.

Clint grinned at him around his own mouthful of plastic, then turned to start running.

They headed almost directly west without any more diversions. They crossed a river almost immediately, and another one, and then ran through a strip of woodlands for a while. By the time they came out the other side, to where farmland stretched out in front of them for miles, it was dark enough that two fast-moving shapes probably wouldn’t be seen.

The fields were easier to run across, although James didn’t like how exposed it felt, even with the night settling around them. They ran for miles and miles, occasionally crossing a deserted road, then hit another river, surrounded on both sides by trees. Clint paused there, glancing at James as if to ask how he was doing. James gave a nod to show that he was fine with carrying on.

Now that it was full dark and pretty much everyone was indoors where they couldn’t see two strange wolves running across the country, James was enjoying himself. Having Clint just in front of him to follow after, knowing that they were heading towards a place where they could make a den together and settle down for at least a few weeks, was making all James’s wolf instincts light up with satisfaction.

He readjusted his grip on the bag in his mouth, grinned at Clint as well as he could, and then they were off again, jogging along the river until they found a place they could cross, then heading back across more fields. James could see the lights of a small town to their south, but Clint didn’t head that way. He kept north of it, curving around until they’d crossed a larger road than the others they’d dashed across.

From there, his pace settled into an easier lope. They crossed another couple of fields, and finally Clint led them down a driveway, past a stand of trees that blocked this property from the road. James noticed cameras hidden high up in a couple of them, and a couple of traps that Clint led them around.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when the house came in sight and Clint led them up onto the porch rather than going around it. He dropped his bag and transformed back into a human so he could reach above the porch swing and pull out a key.

“Home sweet home,” he said, glancing at James, who stayed as a wolf for now, glancing out at the night where nothing bigger than a raccoon was moving.

He changed back once they were inside the house, looking around at the shabby state of the place. “This is yours?” he asked, glancing back at Clint.

Clint’s eyes darted up to his face and James realised, with a strange sense of dissociation, that he’d been looking at James’s body. 

James couldn’t remember anyone showing any interest in his body before, unless it was to break it down and build it back up as something else. That Clint, who had seen James naked almost as much as James had seen him, would still find it worth looking at felt impossible.

Perhaps he had just been checking for injuries after the long run together. They’d had to squeeze through undergrowth in a couple of places, maybe he was worried James had been cut on a thorn at some point.

“Yeah, all mine,” said Clint. “No one else knows about it. Well, my pack know I have a place, but not exactly where it is. I wasn’t intending to ever bring anyone else here.”

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter that he’d brought James to his private place, when it must have meant a lot to him to keep it a secret if he hadn’t even told his pack.

“Thank you,” said James, because it would have been so easy for Clint to have left him in The Boulevard, or even just ditched him along the way. The words came out thick with an emotion that he had to swallow back.

Clint ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he said, looking away. “Okay, so, it’s kinda late, how about we leave the tour for tomorrow? I’ve got a spare bedroom that’s mostly fixed up, let’s get some bedding sorted. And some clothes, you should fit what I’ve got here, although it might be a bit long on you.”

James nodded and followed him upstairs, allowing his own eyes to run over the lines of Clint’s body as he did so. He didn’t seem to have been injured on their run either, but it was best to double-check.

****

James knew he needed to sleep that night if he were to remain in optimal condition. He hadn’t slept at all the previous night and the run had been long enough to tire him out on top of that.

The problem was that he just couldn’t sleep. Clint had shown him the spare room and given him an armful of clothes and bedding that smelled faintly like him, but then he’d retreated into his own bedroom and shut the door. No matter how much James buried his nose into the clothes, breathing in the familiar relaxation of Clint’s smell, he couldn’t push away the fear that something would happen to Clint while James wasn’t there to watch over him. 

In the end, he transformed back into a wolf and took a blanket to make a nest in front of Clint’s door. He settled in, one ear pressed close to the wood where he’d be able to hear if anything happened, and finally managed to slip off into sleep.

He slept deeper than he’d been intending to, and didn’t wake up until the door was opened.

“Oh shit,” said Clint, and James sat up, shaking his head. “Shit, didn’t realise you were there.” Clint was wearing a faded purple towel wrapped around his waist, clearly heading to the bathroom. James took a moment to really appreciate the look, and how the towel had slipped down to reveal his hip bones.

“Have you been here all night?” asked Clint, taking in the blanket.

James felt his shoulders hunching up and tried out a glare in the hopes it would stop Clint from saying anything further about it.

Clint just grinned at him and reached down to ruffle his ears. “Let me show you the security around this place after breakfast, maybe you’ll be able to let your guard down a bit then.”

James couldn’t stop himself from relaxing into the feel of Clint’s hand on his fur and gently butted his head up against him. Clint’s grin just grew and he gave James a thorough petting, then stepped away. “Okay, I’m going to have a shower,” he said, “then I’ll make breakfast. I’ll leave a clean towel in the bathroom for you, if you want to shower as well.”

He headed into the bathroom and James watched him go, already missing the warmth of his touch.

He wasn’t sure he was ever going to be properly relaxed enough to sleep anywhere that Clint wasn’t, no matter how good the security was. He just wanted to be somewhere where he could hold Clint in his arms, or snuggle up against his fur.

But he wasn’t going to get that. Just because he loved Clint didn’t mean Clint could ever feel the same back. James needed to let him make his own choices, even if those choices didn’t include James.

****

Clint sang in the shower. James stayed out in the hallway where he could hear it better and realised it was the same song he’d heard Clint singing on the warehouse rooftop, what felt like a lifetime ago.

“Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit.”

James could remember wanting to hear more of Clint’s singing even then, back before he’d know just how important he was.

Clint’s voice was nice to listen to, even if he fell flat on some of the notes. James found himself creeping closer to the bathroom door to listen, then had to scamper off to hide in his room when the shower turned off.

When it was James’s turn in the shower, he wondered if he should be singing as well, but no matter how much he squeezed at his memory, he couldn’t remember any songs. He probably could have given Clint’s song a stab after hearing him run through it a few times that morning, but he didn’t want to reveal just how closely he’d been listening, so instead he just washed in silence.

Breakfast wasn’t much. Clint had plenty of supplies in the house but it was all in tins, clearly bought with the intention that it would last a good long time.

“I’ll head into town this afternoon,” said Clint. “Pick up some groceries.”

“No,” said James. “We can’t be seen.”

Clint grinned at him. “ _You_ can’t be seen, Mr Assassin. As far as anyone around here is concerned, I’m a real estate dealer from Baltimore who likes to come out here every few months for a break from the cutthroat world of property development. They all think I’m a prick but none of them are gonna raise an eyebrow at me picking up a bunch of supplies. And I know you see Hydra everywhere, but I don’t think even they’ve got an agent in Bumfuck, Iowa.”

James felt his hands clench into fists. He couldn’t let Clint out of his sight. He couldn’t let him go off where he couldn’t protect him, where anyone could get to him.

Except, he’d already made the decision that he wasn’t going to take Clint’s choices from him. 

_“If you love someone, you have to give them the freedom to be themselves,”_ whispered the woman’s voice in his memory.

“You’re taking weapons,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” said Clint. “Don’t worry about that, I am taking a lot of weapons. And I’m gonna pick us up a couple of burner phones as well.” He nodded at the house phone. “I’ll give you a call if anything happens, I swear.”

James took a deep breath and nodded. “Fine,” he said, although it really wasn’t.

“First I’ll take you around and show you the property,” said Clint. “I know it kinda looks like it’s falling apart, but I’ve got all the security stuff in place already.”

He took James around the whole farm, showing him the cameras and traps around the house and the surrounding woods, the best direction to run if they needed to get away and the best places to meet up if they got separated. He showed James the range in the barn and the weapons locker in the basement and the closet that opened out into a security hub, with views from the cameras all around the property.

He let James into every part of his safehouse, which James was beginning to realise must have taken him a good couple of years to get set up.

“You should keep a few details to yourself,” said James when Clint started to show him the code for the weapons locker. “If Hydra get me back…”

“Not gonna happen,” said Clint. “Or, well, never say never I guess, but if they get you, they’ll have me too, because I’m not going to stand by and let that happen. I’ll be fighting right along with you to keep them away from you.”

Too many emotions piled up in James’s chest at the idea of Clint sacrificing himself for James. It hurt even to think about Hydra getting Clint, but that Clint might think James was important enough to take that risk for was…

He couldn’t find words for it, not even in his own thoughts.

“Any rate,” said Clint, “seems stupid to have weapons that you can’t get to when you might need to protect yourself. The code’s 09-27-99.” He grinned at James widely enough for him to want to reach out and touch it. “First airdate of _Dog Cops_.”

“Right,” said James, and his voice sounded hoarse. He cleared his throat as he commited the date to memory. “I guess that’s not something anyone else is going to guess at.”

“Only because they’re all philistines,” said Clint cheerfully, pulling out a bow and a quiver and then shutting the weapons locker again and, fuck, James didn’t just want to touch his smile, he wanted to taste it.

No. No, he couldn’t get that close to Clint. They weren’t even pack, after all. James needed to keep his distance. He could be in love with the guy without getting distracted by the idea of kissing him every five minutes.

Couldn’t he?

****

It turned out the answer was a solid no on that one.

Lunch also came out of cans, and the whole time Clint was heating it up and then sitting across the table from him James couldn’t keep from watching his mouth, wondering what those lips would feel like against his.

Would Clint smile against James’s mouth as he kissed him? Would he wrap his arms around him and pull him in close? Would he kiss like he was telling a joke, easy and relaxed, inviting James to share the moment with him? Or would he be more like he had been when they’d been moving through a town in the dark, quietly competent and completely confident?

He wouldn’t do any of that, James reminded himself. He wouldn’t be happy if James kissed him. Clint had made it clear that he didn’t feel anything close to what James felt for him. If they weren’t pack, they sure as hell wouldn’t be anything more and definitely not anything that involved kissing.

After lunch, Clint went to put on his corporate-douchebag-on-holiday outfit, which featured expensive-looking jeans that were sculpted to his ass in a way James couldn’t keep his eyes off. He wore them with a white button-down shirt and a pair of sunglasses, and did something to his hair that made it look like he’d spent hours grooming himself. Suddenly his stubble didn’t look like he’d been on the run for a few days without access to a razor, but like he’d carefully curated it to be the exact right length to be sexy.

It made him look like someone else entirely, and James hated it. He crossed his arms over his chest as Clint opened up the barn he kept a truck in.

“An hour and I’m coming after you,” he said.

Clint rolled his eyes. “Two hours. I’m going to have to go to a couple of different stores.”

James twitched at the idea of being apart from him for that long, but nodded. “Agreed. Two hours, but not a minute longer.”

“Got it,” said Clint, grinning at him in a goofy way that didn’t match his outfit at all. James felt himself relax at the reminder that his Clint was still there, under the disguise.

No, not _his_ Clint. He wasn’t allowed to lay claim to him, however much he wanted to.

“Okay,” said Clint, chucking the truck keys in the air and catching them. “Catch you later, then.”

James nodded stiffly and stood back out of the way as Clint drove the truck out of the barn and down the drive. He watched until it was out of sight, hands clenched tightly into fists to stop himself doing something stupid like running after it.

What was he going to do for two hours to stop himself from freaking out about what might be happening to Clint?

He went back into the house and cleared up their lunch, then cleaned the rest of the kitchen, because it was pretty obvious that the place hadn’t been used in a few months. He went through the pantry, cataloguing their supplies, then let himself go back down to the weapons locker and go over those supplies as well. There were a fair few bows and quivers full of arrows which James didn’t touch, but there were guns as well, including a AS50 rifle that his fingers itched to get hold of.

He locked it all back up without taking anything out though, because it felt wrong to touch another guy’s weapons behind his back.

He went back up into the main part of the house and sat on the porch for a couple of minutes, trying to settle into the calm mindset of waiting for the next part of a mission that he used to find so easy.

He couldn’t seem to get close to it. The longer he sat without doing anything, the more images his brain presented him with of what could be happening to Clint right now. He ended up getting up and jogging for the drive, half-intending to chase after him and-

Nope. They’d agreed two hours.

He ran his hands up into his hair with frustration, turning around to look at the property again, then strode back to the house. If he couldn’t get himself to calm down when he was a human, maybe he should try being a wolf. After all, there was no one around to dictate which shape he should be any more.

He left his clothes on the porch and ran off into the woods around the house on four paws, and immediately felt better. Everything was somehow simpler as a wolf. As long as he had animal scents to chase around after and new territory to explore, he could press down most of the anxiety over Clint.

He went around the entire farm, checking over all the security features again and familiarising himself with the landscape. In addition to the house and the trees around it, there was a barn and a couple of overgrown fields at the back, stretching down towards a stream. The nearest neighbouring house was the other side of the stream, across a meadow containing a handful of cows. James felt something in his chest settle at how isolated they were. He didn’t want to have to share Clint with anyone, he wanted the rest of the world to stay as far away as possible.

Except that wasn’t what Clint wanted. James didn’t get to have any part of him other than their shared need to hide away from Hydra.

That was what he should be concentrating on, rather than mourning over all the things he was never going to get with Clint. He should be getting to know the farm well enough that if Hydra did attack them, he knew every part of it, and exactly how to defend it.

He trotted to the furthest part of Clint’s land, then braced himself, set his sights on the distant roof of the house, and sprinted for it, counting in his head how many seconds it took to reach the porch. He arrived panting with exhaustion but quickly enough that he’d be able to defend Clint if anyone arrived while he was that far out. He then went to the other corner of the farm and repeated the experiment.

Racing against the ticking clock in his head, stretching his legs and feeling fresh earth under his paws felt better than he could have expected. He couldn’t remember ever being able to do this as a wolf, just run about and settle into the instincts that came with having four legs and a tail. Hydra had only told him to shift when they’d needed the wolf for a mission, and he didn’t think he’d ever shifted without being told to when he was with them.

He hadn’t done anything without being told to.

He was sniffing his way along the eastern boundary of the farm, checking over the fence for breaks and thinking that several parts of it needed patching, when he heard the truck engine coming back.

He immediately went bounding back through the woods to see Clint pulling up by the barn.

“Hey!” he said, grinning as he got out and grabbing a couple of bags.

James couldn’t keep himself from trotting over to get a better nose of his scent. His tail began to wag and he couldn’t seem to control it.

“Man, it’s a great day for a run around,” said Clint, glancing up at the sun. “Give me a minute to get this stuff inside, and I’ll join you.”

James had been heading for the porch to transform back and get his clothes on, but he paused at the idea of getting to run around with Clint instead. He could still remember how exhilarating it had been to play around with him in the bar. He could only imagine that it would be even better out in the open, with all this space around them to go running through.

Clint was only a minute or two inside, and was already a wolf when he came back outside. His face lit up with a tongue-lolling grin and he ran straight at James, jumping on him playfully, then he took off running into the woods when James tried to bat a paw at him in retribution.

James immediately ran after him, scrambling through the underbrush to leap on him in return, tumbling them both over. He had a sudden flash of memory, of play-wrestling as a child with the tiny blond kid he’d remembered before, fighting over a comic book, both of them scrabbling at each other while half-laughing.

This felt exactly like that, like nothing he’d had for years as he and Clint chased each other between the trees, leaping on each other and batting gently at each other. Clint’s mouth was hanging open with glee and pleasure, and James could feel his own doing the same, joy lighting up his heart.

He lost track of how long they were out there, losing himself in the rough-and-tumble of their games until Clint let out a heavy sigh and flopped over on his side, giving James a tired grin. James collapsed next to him, as close as he dared, and felt a quiet thrill when Clint rolled to sprawl over his back, licking a sloppy tongue over James’s fur in a gesture of affection that James didn’t feel worthy of.

He wasn’t going to discourage it though, not when he could take it as a sign that he was allowed to return the gesture with a series of rough licks over Clint’s neck, breathing in his scent at the same time.

They lay like that for longer than James would have dared if Clint’s weight wasn’t holding him down, but not as long as he wanted. But then, he wasn’t sure he’d ever find the upper limit on how long he’d like to be cuddled up with Clint.

Clint shifted off him with relaxed movements, nuzzling James for a moment before flicking his head back in the direction of the house. James nodded and stood up, following him back while listening to the birdsong overhead and the soft sound of the wind in the trees.

He’d never felt freer. Clint had given him that.

They shifted back and James pulled on his clothes on the porch while Clint headed inside to find his. When he went inside, Clint turned to him with the same relaxed, easy grin that he’d had as a wolf. “This is a better den than an abandoned basement, right?”

James could only nod in agreement.

****

Now that they had fresh food, James took over cooking dinner that night. He didn’t remember how he knew how to make a meal but he found that as long as he didn’t try and push the memories, his hands knew what to do.

And he wanted to provide for Clint, wanted him to sit down and eat something James had created for him. They might not be pack, but he could still do that much for him.

Clint had bought two burner phones that he put on to charge. “I don’t suppose we’ll need them much, but they’ll be a help next time I go out for supplies,” he said. “Or if we have to run and get separated.”

He hesitated, turning one of the phones over in his hand then glancing up at James. “And no one will be able to trace it if I do contact my pack,” he said softly.

“No,” said James immediately, then scowled at himself, because he’d decided he wasn’t going to dictate what Clint did any more.

“Look,” said Clint, “Natasha’s got at least three phones I don’t think SHIELD even knows about. I can send her a quick text, make it look like spam, and she’ll recognise our code and know to go buy a burner and call me back. There’s no way for Hydra to find out about it. And she’s the best spy, no one ever knows anything about her that she doesn’t want them to know, so they won’t notice a change in her behaviour either.” 

James took a deep breath. “And your pack leader?”

Clint shrugged. “Coulson’s a mystery to everyone. Half of SHIELD just think he’s a glorified clerk. He’s made a career out of being underestimated.”

James turned back to the stove, stirring the saucepan with a vicious movement. “It’s up to you,” he said through gritted teeth.

Clint was silent for a moment while James scowled down at the pan.

“Thanks,” he said softly. “You won’t regret it. If Hydra really are as embedded in SHIELD as you said, it feels like someone should be trying to dig them out and, well…” he waved his hands vaguely around, “it’s not going to be us.”

That made sense. Presumably Clint would want to go back to his life eventually, even if all James wanted to do was hole up here with him and see if he could create a home that matched with the warm feeling that being with Clint gave him.

“Dinner’s ready,” he said instead, taking the pan off the stove to serve up.

****

Clint went out on to the porch after dinner to contact his pack. James stayed inside, laying out a game of Solitaire. Clint was gone a while, and although James couldn’t hear exactly what Clint was saying, he found himself getting distracted by the warm and affectionate tone of Clint’s voice.

That was how Clint spoke to his real pack. He had to remember that he was just the lone wolf Clint had picked up along the way.

Clint was grinning when he came back inside. “It’s cool, they only thought I was maybe dead,” he said, sitting down opposite James. “Apparently I’ve got a reputation for doing shit that makes it look like I’m dead and then turning out to be fine after all.”

James wasn’t sure that was a reason to be grinning, but he didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, Nat’s only kinda mad at me and, uh, I told them where we are so they’re going to come out here.”

James looked up from his cards. “No,” he said. “They’ll lead Hydra straight to us.”

Clint shook his head. “It’s cool, Coulson is setting up a cover, giving Natasha a fake mission in Chicago. She’s gonna head off for it, then come out here as a wolf. He’s gonna make it look like the mission went wrong, then come out and join us under the disguise of sorting it out.”

James wasn’t sure that would be enough, but he also wasn’t sure how much of his instinctive reaction that they shouldn’t come was about keeping Clint safe and how much was his jealousy of their role in his life.

“As long as they take every precaution,” he said, through clenched teeth.

Clint gave him a long look that felt like he saw too much, then glanced down at the cards. “Wanna play Go Fish?”

James let out a long breath and dumped the cards he was holding on the table. “Sure.”

****

That night, when they went up to bed, James hesitated in the doorway of his room after Clint had gone inside his. He didn’t want to sleep apart from him again but he had a feeling that if Clint found James asleep at his door for a second day in a row, he’d start to get irritated.

Or at the very least, sit him down and have another talk with him about what pack was and wasn’t, and James couldn’t even bear the idea of that, let alone have to endure it. He knew he wasn’t Clint’s pack now, he didn’t need it rubbed in.

He was still caught in indecision when Clint came back out of his room with a towel, heading for the bathroom.

“Oh, hey,” he said, then must have read James’s hesitation on his face because instead of going to clean his teeth, he paused and leaned against his doorframe. “Uh, what are the chances of me coming out tomorrow to find you here again?”

James winced, then admitted the truth to both of them. “Pretty high.” He wasn’t going to get any sleep if he wasn’t as close to Clint as he could get.

Clint let out a sigh and glanced down the landing, clearly thinking. “Okay,” he said softly, and James perked up at the thought that he might be able to sleep at Clint’s door and not upset him. “Okay, if it’s like that, my bed’s plenty big enough, you might as well share it.”

James stared at him. “What?”

Clint shrugged awkwardly. “I mean, if you’re going to be a wolf anyway, why not?”

James didn’t know how to react to that. He didn’t get much of a chance to, because Clint was moving towards the bathroom again. “You should bring a blanket with you, this place gets pretty cold at night, even for a wolf.”

James stayed stuck in place until Clint had shut the bathroom door, then finally roused himself, letting out a deep breath. He was going to get to sleep pressed close to Clint again. That kind of closeness hadn’t ended with their journey.

He was smiling again. He touched his fingers to his face to feel it, then ducked into his room to undress and grab his blanket.

****

Clint’s bed was big enough that even after he’d snuggled down under the covers, James was able to sprawl out over the other half, twitching his blanket into a comfortable nest then setting his head down on his paws where he could watch Clint’s eyes drifting shut.

It was weirdly intimate sleeping beside Clint while he was a human, after all those nights of snuggling together as wolves, but the same scent still permeated everything, wrapping around James and pulling him into that warm, easy state of relaxation because Clint was _his_ and he was right there, safe and content.

James drifted off without once twitching awake at one of the faint noises of the countryside outside, without even thinking about how Hydra agents might be circling the house right now. When he woke up, Clint was still asleep, face slack in the morning light and quietly snoring. James just stayed right where he was and watched.

How could Clint say they weren’t pack? Everything about this moment felt like James belonged right here, beside Clint, for the rest of his life.

Clint woke up slowly, face twitching into an unhappy expression that James wanted to smooth away. When his eyes finally fluttered open, he focused on James for a moment, then smiled, reaching out with a clumsy hand to pet his ears. “Hey, it’s you,” he said in the faintly off-key tone that he had when he wasn’t wearing his hearing aids.

James felt his face crease into a matching smile and he leaned closer to nuzzle a _good morning_ to Clint’s neck.

Clint let out a sigh and reached for his hearing aids on the nightstand. “You gonna shower first or do I have to get up right now?” he asked, with a bit of a whine in his voice.

James thought about being able to put the coffee on and prepare breakfast while Clint was showering so that when he came downstairs it was waiting for him, and stood up, shaking the blanket off. He pressed his nose to Clint’s cheek again, then headed off to make that happen.


	4. Chapter 4

It was mid-afternoon the next day before the first member of Clint’s pack arrived. 

They were on the porch swing, Clint cradling a cup of coffee while James was slumped across his lap as a wolf. It meant he didn’t have any coffee of his own, but he’d worked out that when he was a wolf Clint not only let him get closer, but also did things like absent-mindedly reaching to scrub his fingers through the fur of James’s neck, and there was no way James was missing out on that.

Being on the farm was taking some getting used to. James wasn’t used to having all this free time with no definite purpose and he found himself following Clint around more often than not, waiting for orders that didn’t ever come. Clint divided his time between practicing at the range in the barn and fixing up some of the shabbier parts of the farm, apparently happy enough if James joined in but also happy if he just wanted to sit back and watch.

Mostly James liked watching when Clint was at the range. He’d never really considered how attractive archery could be, but then being able to feel attraction again after sixty years with Hydra was a new thing.

And fuck, he was so attracted to Clint. When he stood with his bow, tall and steady, all his muscles taut, it was all James could do not to crowd in close and wrap himself around him, sticking his face into his neck and taking a deep breath and-

Mostly he stayed as a wolf and pretended he was napping in the sun by the barn door while Clint was shooting. It was easier to cover his reactions that way.

Clint patted at James’s flank. “Think there’s time before nightfall to fix up the woodshed?”

James gave a vague shrug with the front of his body, too relaxed by the sunshine and being pressed up close to Clint to really think about it properly. He wasn’t sure just how much needed to be done to the woodshed but he thought he could fall into a proper nap here, and maybe Clint would just let him, would keep absently stroking him and letting him breathe in his scent. 

There was a noise on the border of the property, louder than anything a squirrel or a racoon could make. James pricked his ears, sitting up, and as soon as his nose wasn’t overwhelmed by Clint’s scent he could smell a strange wolf, approaching from the south.

He let out a growl, jumping down from the swing, and Clint tensed behind him, setting down his mug and picking up the bow that hadn’t been far away from him since they’d arrived. 

James glanced at him, wondering if he could persuade him to go back inside and maybe lock himself in the safe room while James took care of this. The way Clint was standing, alert and ready, made him think he wouldn’t have much luck with that, even if he did shift back to human so they could have it out.

He wanted to stay wolf though, wanted to have his teeth and claws available to rip apart this other wolf that had dared intrude on their territory, so instead he jumped down the porch steps, trotting towards where he could hear it. Clint had a long-range weapon; if he stayed on the porch, he could have James’s back and still stay safely out of the way.

The strange wolf didn’t seem to be trying to cover their approach at all. They came straight through the woods, then around the barn, heading right for the house even when they came in sight of James.

It was a female wolf, with black fur and unnerving amber eyes, moving with a relaxed lope that set every one of James’s hackles up, because anyone coming close to Clint while he was there should at least be cautious about it.

He let out a growl and she slowed down, giving him a long, steady look, then glanced over his shoulder.

“Hey, it’s okay, James,” said Clint, coming up behind him, and why the hell hadn’t the idiot stayed safe on the porch?

Clint dropped a hand to James’s neck as he passed, ruffling through the fur for a couple of seconds before he kept moving forward. “It’s just Nat.”

He dropped to his knees and the strange wolf - Natasha - moved in close to delicately press her nose to his neck, then followed up with a short lick before stepping away again. Clint set his hand on her back, giving her a long stroke that made James’s fur itch with jealousy.

“Oh fuck, I’m so glad to see you,” Clint said to her, and the note of relief in his voice wasn’t anything James had heard before. The jealousy jumped up higher in his chest and he had to sit back on his haunches to stop himself from leaping in to try and take Clint’s attention for himself instead.

She was Clint’s real pack, after all. James couldn’t measure up to that.

Natasha was giving Clint a thorough going over with her nose, clearly looking for injuries. Once she was content he was in one piece, she moved back and glared at him.

“Yeah, I know,” said Clint, as if she’d actually said something. “But in my defence, how was I meant to know about an international Nazi terrorist group coming after me?”

She snorted and rolled her eyes, then her gaze slipped past Clint and rested on James.

And the thing was, as soon as James had stopped assessing her as a threat and actually paid attention to her scent, he’d recognised it. Clint had been right, she had been one of those terrified girls that he’d bitten, years and years ago.

She walked slowly towards him and James held still against the urge to either run away or go to Clint for reassurance.

She paused about a foot from him, regarding him with a long, cool look, then moved in closer to press her nose to his neck. James held himself very still, against all his instincts to pounce and prove himself stronger than her, place himself higher in the hierarchy. He’d been the one to bite her, to make her into something other than human, and then he’d just left her and her sisters without giving them any guidance or trying to create a pack with them. He wasn’t going to start now by attacking her.

Instead, he carefully took a breath of her scent in return. It was familiar, notes he recognised from his own scent mixed with the memory of a red-headed girl, smaller than the others but holding herself with more confidence. She hadn’t cried, she’d just stared him down as he moved forward to bite her.

It wasn’t anything like that first breath of Clint’s scent had been, though. There was none of the same recognition that this wolf belonged to him, that they were each other's and James needed to do everything he could to protect him. Natasha just smelt like someone he had once met, and who he might like the chance to know properly.

She stepped back after a moment, then turned back to where Clint was still standing and watching. James followed her gaze, and Clint let out what looked like a long-held breath.

“Okay, good,” he said. “No one’s getting bitey, excellent news. Come on, let’s go inside, I’ll put more coffee on.”

Natasha dipped her head in a nod, gave James one last look, then started towards the house. James immediately followed, as close to Clint as he could get without getting in his way. He wanted to do something to make it clear that Clint belonged to him but the truth was that he didn’t. If anyone didn’t belong here, it was James.

Just thinking that hurt, even when Clint’s hand dropped to James’s ears, apparently without thinking, and he caressed them as they climbed up the porch steps.

“Nat, there’s clothes you can borrow in my room,” he said as he opened the front door for her. “First left up the stairs.”

She gave a little nod and started up the stairs and James hesitated, torn between following the strange wolf who was heading for the heart of the den he and Clint had been creating, to the room where the blankets were still rumpled and smelling of both of them, and sticking close to Clint.

Clint gave his ears one last petting. “You should be human as well,” he added. “Natasha’s going to want to talk about Hydra.”

The last thing James wanted to do was to shift back so that all the awkward jealousy he was feeling would be lumped up in his human chest, which felt things in a different, more complicated way to his wolf one. He knew Clint was right though, so he padded reluctantly up the stairs, leaving Clint to put the coffee machine on.

The door to Clint’s bedroom was half-open and when he glanced inside, Natasha was still a wolf, using her nose to investigate the bed. She caught his eye and gave him an intense look that made James swallow down a growl as he met it, not willing to back down but all too aware he shouldn’t actually confront her.

After a tense few seconds, she let out an amused breath, then hopped down from the bed, trotting over to push the door shut.

James let out a sigh and headed into the spare room, the one he didn’t sleep in but which still had some of the clothes he’d borrowed from Clint in anyway, because that meant they weren’t sharing a room, with all that implied, just denning up together overnight. Or so he assumed Clint probably was telling himself, from the way he’d talked about it.

James shifted back to human and pulled on some clothes. All Clint’s clothes were too big for him but they were laced with Clint’s smell even after being laundered, so James didn’t mind that so much.

When he went back downstairs Natasha and Clint were in the lounge, drinking coffee while Clint gave her a rundown of the events of the last week or so. There was a mug of coffee waiting for James on the coffee table so he sat down next to Clint, trying to keep enough distance between them for it not to be weird. They’d ended up slumped pretty close together last night when they’d been watching TV, but he didn’t know where the lines were between pack and not-pack behaviour. Why would Clint want to get close to James now that some of his real pack was here?

James did his best to ignore the long look Natasha gave him, clearly taking in all the details of his human form while Clint kept talking, describing their time in The Boulevard and how they’d decided to come out here. He made it sound a lot more like a calm discussion and a mutual agreement rather than an argument that James had lost.

As Clint talked, he shifted towards James, reaching out to pat his knee a couple of times when he mentioned things he’d done. Natasha’s eyes followed the movement and then flicked up to James’s face, and he had no idea what she was thinking.

“And then we got here,” finished Clint with a shrug. “And I guess we’re going to be here a while, if they’re really so keen on getting hold of me.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “There’s been increased chatter,” she said. “Not on the SHIELD networks, but I contacted my sources outside of that and there’s talk about something big going on, people moving around and rewards for the right kind of information.”

James clenched his hands around his coffee mug. “They were meant to think we were dead.”

“I think they do,” said Natasha, “but there are no bodies, and everyone in the business is paranoid.”

“I mean, for good reason,” said Clint. “I can’t think of a spy who hasn’t faked their own death at least once.”

James bit back a frustrated noise. “They will never stop hunting me,” he said, the force of the realisation tingeing his voice with desperation. “I will never be safe.”

“Hey,” said Clint, turning to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll fix this, okay? They’re not getting you back.”

James was caught on the soft certainty of his gaze for a moment, then nodded and looked back at Natasha, clenching his jaw to keep the emotion out of his voice. “The SHIELD networks are also Hydra networks,” he said. “All the information SHIELD gets has been vetted by Hydra first, to make sure it doesn’t give them away.”

She nodded slowly. “I was afraid you’d say that.” She looked at Clint and raised an eyebrow. “Budapest.”

Clint winced. “Yeah,” he said, tiredly. “It does explain a couple of things.”

They were both quiet for a moment, matching tired expressions on their faces, and James tried to imagine how it must feel to know that something you’d believed in so strongly was riddled with terrorists.

“Coulson will know what to do,” said Clint, eventually.

Natasha snorted. “Sure,” she said, sitting back. “Always does.” She turned to look at James and it felt like she was looking for a distraction as much as anything else, right up until she said, “You were working for Hydra when you turned me.”

James held still. “Yes,” he agreed, meeting her gaze as steadily as he could. “Your organisation paid Hydra for my services.”

That felt like the wrong word for what he’d done, but it was the one his handler had used at the time and James didn’t know how else to talk about it.

She nodded slowly. “There’s not so many werewolves around who’ll happily bite twenty little girls and then walk away.”

James’s teeth ground together, but he forced them open to say, “I didn’t want to walk away. Even then, I remember wanting to stay with you all. Wanted to- to be pack for you.” It felt like he was having to force the words out from the bottom of his soul, dragging the weak memory of his feelings out and finding words to fit around them. “I’m sorry,” he offered, because there didn’t seem much more he could give her.

“Hey,” said Clint, and he put his arm around James again, stroking over his back. “Not exactly something you had a choice over, right?” He sent Natasha a glare that James wasn’t sure he was meant to see, and she rolled her eyes in return.

“I never blamed you,” she said to James. “The Red Room made us into what they wanted in a variety of different ways, and many of them were worse than being a wolf.”

James managed a nod because he knew how that felt. If he were to make a list of all the things Hydra had done to him from worst to best, becoming a wolf would be down near the bottom. Especially now it had got him free of them and let him spend this time with Clint, however long that lasted.

“Okay, this is depressing,” said Clint. “I’m gonna make dinner.” He ran his hand up James’s neck into his hair, giving it a ruffle before he stood up. “You gonna help?”

“Yes,” said James, shaking his hair back into order before standing up. “Your cooking is terrible.”

Natasha snorted a laugh. “Apparently he’s already got you pegged,” she said to Clint, standing up to follow them into the kitchen. “I’ve got to be honest, I’d have thought that you’d have started bribing the nearest pizza place to deliver out here by now.”

James turned a fierce glare on her as Clint sighed, shoulders slumping. “James said he’d knock me out, put me in the truck and drive north until we hit wilderness if I did that.”

“We’re meant to be in hiding,” James pointed out, just as he’d had to five times last night before Clint had agreed to spaghetti instead.

He ended up doing most of the cooking while Clint and Natasha talked. It seemed like Natasha was leaving most of her questions about Hydra until their pack leader arrived, which made sense. James would probably need to brace himself to tell them everything he could remember.

The idea of having to reach down into all the worst parts of his patchy memory and lay it out for strangers made him feel sick. He glanced at Clint and reminded himself that it wouldn't just be strangers he’d be talking to.

Clint caught his look and grinned at him. “If you’ve got this, I’ll lay the table.”

“Sure,” said James, turning back to the stove. He’d worry about all that later, once their whole pack was here.

****

After dinner, James sat quietly in the lounge and let Clint and Natasha argue over what they were going to watch on TV. He wasn’t entirely surprised when Natasha won, but he was surprised when Clint threw himself onto the sofa beside James, close enough to be pressed against him. James held himself still, then let himself slowly relax against Clint while Natasha sat in the armchair and ignored Clint’s muttered commentary about the movie she’d picked.

Halfway through, they paused for a snack break and James gave in to temptation, coming back from the bathroom as a wolf instead of a human. He climbed up onto the sofa and Clint automatically moved to give him space to lie half in his lap. James snuggled in, turning his head to face the screen although he didn’t care what was happening in the movie, and caught the faint frown Natasha was giving them.

“You’re sharing a bed,” she said to Clint.

“None of your bus-” started Clint, and got interrupted.

“Any time you’re making one of your dumbass decisions, it’s my business,” she said. “You’ve known him less than two weeks, he’s a brainwashed assassin for a terrorist group who want to torture you, and he barely remembers any of the details of his life. What the hell are you doing, Clint?”

James couldn’t keep in a growl, which she entirely ignored but which brought Clint’s hand to stroke over his ears, as if trying to calm him down.

“It’s nothing like that,” he said, which was disappointing to hear when James desperately wanted it to be exactly like that. “He sleeps on my bed as a wolf. He doesn’t like being alone.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “And this, right now?”

Clint shrugged. “He’s never had a pack, or any of the snuggles that go with one. Why shouldn’t he get them now?”

“This isn’t pack,” said Natasha, eyeing them both. “ _We’re_ pack, Clint. We don’t sleep together at night and pack snuggles are for when one of us is hurt or upset. You’ve been petting him all afternoon and he’s been hovering around you waiting for it.”

James thought back over the afternoon and realised that other than their initial meeting, Clint and Natasha hadn’t really touched. They definitely hadn’t engaged in any of the kinds of snuggling that James had been assuming was pack behaviour.

“He _is_ hurt and upset,” said Clint, but he didn’t sound too sure about it. “He spent sixty years being hurt. I don’t- It’s just a bit of petting, Nat. You know we were touchier when we were building to becoming pack.”

James felt his heart leap at the implication that Clint thought they were working their way to being pack together. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was a lot more than just being thrown together by circumstances and getting along the best they could. He turned his face into Clint’s hand to nuzzle at it, warmth spilling out of his heart into his chest.

“Not like this,” she said, watching them. “This is- I don’t get what it is. There’s something about how you’re acting, about your scents…”

“What?” asked Clint, but she just shook her head with frustration. 

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Seriously, Nat, quit looking for weird shit where there isn’t anything. We’ve had a tough couple of weeks with only each other to rely on, James has had a lot longer than that without anyone at all. It’s just a reaction to all that.”

She didn’t look convinced, but she started the movie running again without saying anything else.

James lay where he was, enjoying the way Clint kept petting him, and wondered what this was if even a wolf who knew what pack was didn’t think it was that. She was right, it felt like more than that. This thing with Clint, the way he smelled to James, the fierce desperation to keep him safe at all costs, the need to curl as close as possible whenever he could...it didn’t look much like what Clint and Natasha had at all.

****

At the end of the night, James stayed as a wolf as he followed Clint back up the stairs, then hesitated on the landing as Clint headed into his bedroom. Would Clint still let him sleep on his bed while Natasha was here? Wouldn’t he want to curl up with his pack rather than James? Or maybe even alone now that Natasha had made it clear that what they had been doing wasn’t normal?

Clint glanced back at him as he hesitated, then over at Natasha, as if looking for guidance.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me that look. If you want to den together, go for it. But, Clint, don’t kid yourself. It’s not pack.”

“Maybe it’s not our kind of pack,” said Clint with a shrug. “There’s probably a bunch of different ways, like there’s different ways to be a family. Some families cuddle up a lot or share beds sometimes, and some of them don’t touch much at all. Maybe different packs are like that.”

“Maybe,” she said, but she sounded very sceptical. “I haven’t really had much more experience than you with pack; you know they didn’t let us really bond like that in the Red Room. Coulson will know.”

Clint cracked a grin. “Coulson knows everything,” he agreed, and it sounded like a well-worn phrase.

Natasha snorted a laugh and nodded, then disappeared into the spare room. Clint looked back at James and held open his bedroom door. “Come on then,” he said, and James lost no time in trotting in and hopping up onto the bed, into the little nest he’d made himself amongst the blankets.

Clint headed out to the bathroom to get ready for bed. When he was back and had got himself settled in bed, he reached out to gently stroke over James’s ears.

“I don’t think it’s that weird,” he said, as if to himself. “She’s just not a very touchy person, I guess.”

James tipped his head so he could lick at Clint’s hand, tasting the trace of mint where he must have wiped his mouth after cleaning his teeth, then settled his head down on his paws.

“Yeah, fuck it,” agreed Clint. “Tomorrow’s problem.” He hooked his aids out of his ears and set them on the nightstand, then flicked out the light and settled on the pillow. “Night, James.”

James pressed his nose to where Clint’s leg was sprawled out under the covers, then let his eyes fall shut.

****

James didn’t sleep very well with someone else in the house and ended up getting up not long after dawn, forcing himself not to hover outside Natasha’s bedroom door where he could keep an eye on her. He took a circuit around the property, then turned back to human and had a shower before making breakfast for the other two.

He wasn’t as happy about getting to feed Natasha as he was about feeding Clint, but he could probably stand to build up some good will with her.

Natasha came down before Clint, made herself coffee, and then settled at the kitchen table to watch James cook rather than going out to the porch like James had been silently willing her to.

“Clint’s a good guy,” she said, after a few minutes had passed.

“Yes,” agreed James. He could hear Clint in the shower, singing away to himself about a singer in a smoky room.

“Very understanding,” she added. James just hummed agreement, glaring down at the bacon he was frying. “Which makes it easy for people to take advantage of him,” she continued.

James let out a sigh, then turned to look at her. “If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”

“I don’t want to see him get hurt,” she said, bluntly.

“Neither do I,” said James. “Kinda the whole reason all this happened,” he added, waving vaguely at the farm. “Otherwise we’d both be in a Hydra base right now.”

She shook her head. “Emotionally hurt,” she said. “He talks a good game, but he’s tender underneath it all. When he cares about someone, he lets himself care enough for it to gut him if they let him down.”

“I’m not going to let him down,” said James, then corrected himself, because some promises you couldn’t keep. “I’m going to do everything I can to avoid it, anyway.”

Her gaze was too-knowing, so he turned back to the bacon.

“Even if he can’t give you everything you want from him?” she asked, softly.

James just shrugged. “Mostly what I want is for him to not get tortured by Hydra.” Which was true, but missed a whole lot of other stuff that James also wanted.

Most of it he wasn’t going to get, of course. He was going to have to find a way to come to terms with that, but mostly as long as they both kept out of Hydra’s hands, he’d be happy.

She was quiet as he put the bacon on a plate, then started on some eggs because he could hear Clint leaving the bathroom upstairs and knew he’d be down in a few minutes.

“He can still be hurt by you without that happening,” she said. “I want you to know that I’ll be very unhappy with you if that does happen.”

James glared down at the eggs for a moment, then turned around again, staring down her glare. “Seems like maybe you’re concentrating on the wrong thing,” he said. “Hydra have agents riddled all through your organisation. They control most of what you do. And now they’re coming after your packmate. Seems like maybe you should be concentrating on that, rather than on me.”

She clenched her jaw and sat back, crossing her arms. “I will be, once Coulson is here.”

James nodded, then turned back to the eggs without saying anything else. A moment later, Clint came clattering down the stairs and the conversation got pushed aside, although James had a feeling it hadn’t been forgotten.

They ate breakfast on the porch, where they could keep an eye on the surrounding area for anyone approaching. James settled on the steps where he could be up and moving in an instant if needed, but Clint and Natasha were more relaxed, sitting together on the porch swing. 

James glanced back at them, listening in to their quiet conversation, and saw Clint leaning into her a few times, as if looking for comfort. After they’d eaten and set aside their plates, Natasha did put her arm around Clint’s shoulders briefly, giving him a pat that James watched Clint relax under, his smile going soft around the edges.

That must be pack.

James looked away, back out across the grass to the barn, wondering how the way Clint always let him slump bonelessly in his lap when James was a wolf fitted with that. Were they becoming pack, or was Natasha right? Was it something else?

Something that might come with kissing, like James desperately wanted?

He couldn’t really imagine anyone wanting to kiss him, not even Clint, so he pushed the thought aside.

“Want to come check out my range?” Clint asked Natasha, and she snorted.

“How did I know that would be the first thing you’d ask?” she said. “Okay, fine, you can show off for a bit. Coulson should be here soon, anyway.”

A foot nudged into James’s back and he turned around. “Are you coming?” Clint asked.

James considered for a moment, because he really enjoyed watching Clint shooting, but his instincts were all telling him to stay on watch now there was a stranger on his property, even if she was Clint’s pack.

And besides, pack. Watching how easy and comfortable they were with each other, James had a feeling he should be giving them a chance to bond, or whatever.

“I’ll keep an eye out here,” he said.

“Okay,” said Clint, and he and Natasha got up, heading for the barn.

James stayed where he was for a few minutes longer, watching them go and then listening to the soft sounds of their voices once they were inside, followed by the unmistakable sounds of Clint using his bow.

He roused himself after that, collecting the breakfast dishes and taking them inside before he headed out to walk the boundary again, this time as a human.

He was on his third circuit when he heard someone approaching from the west and immediately jogged over there, his hand on his gun even before the person had crossed over the ditch that served as a boundary on that side.

It was a small, unassuming man dressed in a suit. That he had his jacket draped over his arm rather than wearing it was the only sign that he’d been walking through the countryside, probably for miles. James pulled out his gun and aimed it at him.

“This is private property,” he said, taking in a deep breath to get the guy’s scent. He smelled of wolf as well as human but James couldn’t get much of a read on him beyond that.

“I know,” said the man, holding his hands up but not looking particularly worried by the gun beyond that. “It belongs to a friend of mine. I’m Phil Coulson, I assume you’re James?”

“I thought you’d be arriving as a wolf,” James said, not lowering his gun.

Coulson made a moue of disgust. “I didn’t want to end up wearing purple sweatpants if I arrived without clothes.”

James very carefully did not look down at the purple sweatpants he was in, with the ankles rolled up to take into account how much taller Clint was than him.

“You know,” said Coulson consideringly, “there’s something familiar about you.”

James thought about his initial reaction to Clint and the way he’d recognised Natasha’s scent from one encounter decades ago. “Yeah, I get that a lot,” he said. He stepped back and gestured with his gun. “Come on, they’re in the barn.”

Coulson started walking, glancing back as James followed him, still holding the gun. “You’re going to keep the gun out?”

“Yep,” said James. “Right up until I’m sure you’re safe. I’m not taking any risks.”

Coulson nodded, turning around to keep walking through the woods. “Probably wise, if what Clint said about Hydra is true.”

“It is,” said James, but didn’t elaborate. Not yet. He’d have to dig that all up and lay it out for Coulson and Natasha soon enough, he couldn’t bring himself to start early.

As they got closer to the barn, he could hear Natasha and Clint bickering inside, though when James and Coulson got within scent range they came tumbling out.

“Phil!” said Clint, grinning like he’d seen coffee or pizza, or one of the other handful of things that James could always guarantee lighting him up with joy. “You made it!” He ducked to hug Coulson, holding on to him as if he were looking for reassurance, which looked a little strange given their mismatched heights.

Natasha held back, giving James’s gun a pointed look until he sighed and tucked it away.

“This calls for coffee!” said Clint, grinning around at all three of them, and then led the way inside the house. James followed behind the others, glancing around at the surroundings to make sure they were still alone.

They went into the kitchen with Clint talking a mile a minute, catching Coulson up with everything that had happened, while Natasha watched with an indulgent smile and occasionally put in a dry comment. James kept back out of the way, not wanting to intrude on what looked like a well-worn ritual.

“And I just want to say ‘I told you so’,” said Clint, “because I knew that stake-out was total bullshit, no way Mishkin would miss Broadway Karaoke.”

“Indeed,” agreed Coulson. “He was there, and he even sang.”

Clint’s face lit up. “ _Music Of the Night_? Did he nail it?”

“I didn’t get to see the performance,” said Coulson. “It was part of the investigation after you went missing.”

Clint pulled a face. “Someone musta videoed it,” he said, turning back to the coffee machine as it beeped. “What kind of superspy agency doesn’t hack everyone’s phones until they find the video?”

“One that is distracted by the disappearance of one of their top agents,” said Coulson. “There was a lot of concern for you, you know.”

Clint rolled his eyes as he handed coffee mugs around, and James took his chance to interject.

“The Hydra double agents would have been concerned about both of us.” Clint came over to hand him his mug and as James took it, he squeezed his shoulder in support. Even after Clint had gone back to grab his own mug, James could feel the warmth of it, shoring him up against the looks on Coulson and Natasha’s faces.

Coulson sighed, looking tired. “Apparently so,” he said. “I don’t suppose you know who they are?”

“Not all of them,” said James, “and I didn’t really get introduced to people anyway, but I know a few. There’s a whole strike team, run by Rumlow-”

“Oh, of fucking course,” muttered Natasha, taking her coffee from Clint and pulling out a chair to sit down. “That asshole.”

Coulson sat next to her and nodded at James, tightening his jaw. “Go on.”

James took a deep breath, thinking back through the last few times he’d been brought out of stasis. There was no sense in telling them about the agents who’d have been dead for twenty years. “Rollins, he’s on the same team as Rumlow,” he said, and they nodded, not looking too surprised. Clint had stayed standing up, leaning back against the kitchen cabinets, and James fixed his eyes on his face so this felt less like a debrief in front of a hostile audience. “Agent Sitwell,” he said, and Coulson‘s shoulders slumped.

“Oh, Jasper,” he muttered sadly, and Natasha reached out to pat his shoulder.

“I didn’t catch his name, but there’s an agent in the Tokyo office, dark hair, blue eyes, weird lisp,” carried on James. Listing all these people he’d been ordered around by, or who he’d seen doing horrible things and then covering it up, while the two members of Clint’s pack looked at him with what felt like judgement was making a fizzy feeling of panic rise up in his chest. He took a deep breath and tried to push it down.

“I think I know him,” said Natasha. “Agent...Kyle? King? Something like that.”

“We can look him up,” said Coulson.

James shook his head, “Don’t make any moves that might be suspicious. I know they have people controlling all the information, you don’t want to get spotted digging where you shouldn’t be.”

Coulson managed a smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep it all completely underground. If you’re not sure exactly how many agents Hydra has in their pocket, do you have any ideas who definitely isn’t?”

James considered that. “Clint,” he said, with a shrug. “And apparently you two.”

“Definitely these two,” said Clint, stepping around to gently push James’s shoulder. “I told you, you can trust them.” He turned to lean back against the wall next to James, their shoulders pressed together, and the solidarity made the rising anxiety in James’s chest settle down.

“I overheard them talking about someone called Fury,” he remembered. “They said he was an obstacle they’d have to eradicate in a few years if they wanted to achieve their goals.”

Coulson let out a breath. “That’s good. If we can get Fury involved, that would be a huge help.”

James had to focus to keep pulling names out, running through memories he hadn’t thought he’d still had. “Carter,” he remembered, frowning. “Don’t know her first name, but there was a lot of complaining about her joining SHIELD, something about them only just having got rid of her aunt?”

“That makes sense,” said Coulson. “There was no way Peggy Carter would have any interest in Hydra, and Sharon’s cut from the same cloth. I’ll reach out to her.” His eyes flickered between Clint and James, almost fast enough for James not to notice, and then he sat back slightly. “Clint, anything you want to tell me?”

Clint stared at him. “Uh, no? Should there be? I thought we’d covered that I’m not Hydra?”

“Not about that,” said Coulson, giving James a pointed look that didn’t mean much to him.

“If we could focus on Hydra for now, rather than whatever weirdness is going on with those two,” interrupted Natasha. “James, is that everyone you know about?”

“No,” said James, softly. He’d been putting this one off because he had a feeling it was going to hurt them the most, and the last thing he wanted was to see Clint hurt. Or his pack, he supposed, as they were so important to him. “There’s someone else. The most senior member of Hydra that I currently know about is also part of SHIELD.”

Clint’s shoulder leaned harder against his. “Go on.”

“Alexander Pierce,” said James, not able to say it much louder than a whisper because some darkly superstitious part of him was afraid of summoning him just by saying his name. “He oversaw my mission briefing for capturing Clint.” 

He hadn’t said anything, but James had seen him in the back of the room, watching with that self-satisfied smile that James was just starting to realise he’d really, really hated, even when he’d been Hydra’s Asset and not meant to have emotions.

“Aw, fuck,” said Clint, miserably. Coulson sat back and was staring up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath, while Natasha was clutching at her mug, glaring into her coffee as if it were the depths of hell.

“That explains how they managed to infiltrate so thoroughly,” she said.

“Yes,” agreed Coulson quietly.

Clint was curling over with misery, so James set his mug down so he could wrap an arm around his shoulders and pull him into a vague embrace. “I’m sorry.”

Clint gave a half-shrug. “Guess it’s not the first time my ultimate boss has decided to take a personal hand in taking me out.”

James wasn’t sure how much more comfort he could offer him right now, in front of his pack and while they were both humans. For a moment he considered turning into a wolf so that he could nuzzle in properly, but he was very aware that they were only just starting with the debrief.

“Could we go into the lounge before I tell you the rest?” he asked. “There are more chairs.”

There was general agreement and they moved rooms, Clint staying close to James and then settling beside him on the sofa, which was a relief. James was aware that he was going to have to dig deep for a lot of this, and he could do with some comfort of his own.

“My memory is still very patchy,” he said as Coulson and Natasha sat down as well, and Coulson nodded his understanding.

“Whatever you can tell us, no matter how small,” he said. “It’ll all help us take them down.”

James nodded agreement and then began, starting from the first tiny scraps that he could remember and moving forward, describing every mission, every facility, every half-glimpsed agent, while Coulson watched him with a steady expression that James found more calming than he would have expected. Natasha was frowning slightly, clearly already trying to put pieces together, but Clint stayed right next to James, leaning into his body and, when he got to some of the harder parts, he put his hand on his knee as a comfort.

Offering comfort even as James described just how completely evil the organisation that Clint had dedicated his life to was. God, James really did love him.

****

It was even more exhausting than James had expected to be dragging everything up and laying it out for these two strangers. He tried to keep as dispassionate as possible, tapping back into the emotionless shell he’d been when he’d debriefed for Hydra, but it was a lot harder now he was aware of who he was and just how shitty the things he’d done had been.

When he’d finally finished and Coulson and Natasha had run out of questions, he slumped back into the sofa, wondering if they’d mind if he went wolf and found somewhere quiet and hidden to curl up.

Ideally with Clint cuddled up with him, but James couldn’t believe for a second that would be happening, not now Clint and his pack needed to talk through whatever they were going to do about Hydra.

“Hey,” said Clint softly to him, “it’s okay, it’s all done now. You won’t have to go through all that again.” He patted at James’s shoulder, then his fingers darted up to tuck James’s hair behind his ear and James felt his heart stutter at the casual intimacy of it. “We get to have lunch now,” added Clint, smiling at James like he hadn’t done anything unusual.

“Yeah,” said James, then cleared his throat when it came back a bit dazed. He glanced around at the others to see them watching, Natasha still frowning and Coulson looking faintly amused. “Let me put something together.” 

He started to get up but Clint pressed down on his shoulder, keeping him in place. “Nope, you’ve been feeding me a lot. It’s my turn now,” he said, getting up and heading into the kitchen.

Coulson let out a very quiet snort that tore James’s eyes away from following Clint to look at him.

“Have they been like this the whole time?” Coulson asked Natasha.

“Weird as hell?” asked Natasha. “Yeah.” She narrowed a very intense look at James, who shifted uncomfortably and wondered if he maybe shouldn’t go and help Clint.

Coulson managed a quiet smile. “Good for Clint,” he said, then wiped the look off his face and took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s what I think we need to do. James and Clint will have to stay here until we’re sure they’re safe-”

“Which won’t be until Hydra’s completely eradicated,” put in James, and then gave a helpless shrug. “I’ve no idea how that can be done. They’re everywhere.”

“First we need them out of SHIELD,” said Coulson. “We need to create a group that we know definitely aren’t Hydra to help us.”

“If Pierce is in on it, it might be better to just tear the whole thing down and start again from scratch,” said Natasha.

James stopped paying attention as they started debating, finding his eyes drawn towards the kitchen, to where he could see Clint moving about through the doorway. Just having his gaze on him felt like it pushed away some of the build-up of tension from the debrief.

Clint turned towards the fridge and caught James looking. He gave him a smile and a wink, and James couldn’t help smiling back, feeling that familiar warmth seeping through him again, the certainty that Clint was _his_ even if he had nothing to support that claim.

Clint brought sandwiches in for everyone, setting Natasha’s and Coulson’s down on the table first before going back to the kitchen to grab his and James’s. He put James’s plate directly into his hands, offering him another smile as he did so, and something about the gesture of being given food by someone he cared about so much made James’s inner wolf sigh with contentment.

“You see?” said Natasha to Coulson. “Weird.”

Coulson snorted. “It’s not weird,” he said.

“Hah!” said Clint, to Natasha. “I told you. It’s not weird, it’s just pack bonding shit after a difficult couple of weeks.”

Natasha glared at him. “That is _not_ pack,” she hissed. “Not that quickly.”

“No,” agreed Coulson. “It’s mates.”

“Packmates,” said Clint, glancing at James with a hesitant look that James couldn’t help returning with a smile, because Clint finally seemed to be admitting that there was a bond between them, that they were some kind of pack.

“No,” said Coulson, “ _Mates_. You know.”

Natasha, Clint and James all looked at him. James could see the same confusion on their faces as he could feel on his.

Coulson looked around at them all, then let out a quiet, “Ah.”

“What other kind of mates is there?” asked Natasha.

Coulson let out a sigh, looking at James. “You said Hydra turned you,” he said, “and that you never knew the wolf that bit you. I’m assuming that means no one ever took the time to actually talk to you about the things that come with being a wolf? Pack and so on?”

“Of course they didn’t. I had to explain it all to him,” said Clint. 

“Okay,” said Coulson. “And you learnt it all from Natasha, who learnt it by trial and error with the other girls at the Red Room.” He rubbed at his forehead. “It’s possible I’ve been remiss in not telling you guys certain things,” he said. “There’s more to being a wolf than just changing shape and having a pack. I didn’t really consider that you would have missed out on finding out about some of that.”

“There’s a reason for it,” James realised. “A reason that he smells like he’s mine, that I couldn’t follow orders and hand him over to Hydra.”

“Yes,” agreed Coulson. “It’s very clear to anyone who knows the signs that you’re mates. Not packmates, the other kind of mates.”

“What the hell other kind of mates?” asked Clint, sitting forward. James wanted to reach for him but he screwed his hands into fists, holding himself still and steady, waiting to hear exactly what this meant for him. He hoped it was something good but given how things usually went for him, he wasn’t banking on it.

Coulson gave a vague shrug. “You know. The in love, romance kind of mate.”

“What,” said Natasha very flatly.

“It’s a werewolf thing,” said Coulson. “You meet another wolf and their scent speaks to you, you feel safe with them, you get on really well together and you get all cuddly with them. It’s your biology and theirs signalling that you two would work together as partners, that you could build on that to form a bond that will last the rest of your lives. You don’t have to, but most people tend to give it a try.” He cleared his throat. “My parents are mates like that. They’re devoted to each other. And my sister met hers a few years ago and, well. They started by disappearing for a month for a sex marathon.” He gave another shrug. “Sometimes it’s like that.”

James considered that for a moment, comparing it to how he felt for Clint. It matched up exactly. “I told you that you felt like mine,” he said to him.

“Jesus fuck,” muttered Clint, not looking at him. “Okay, you were right all along. But….fuck, seriously, Coulson? _Mates_? That’s an actual thing? I thought I was trusting him more than I should just because he turned Natasha and I could smell that.”

“You wouldn’t have trusted him because of that,” said Coulson. “The kinds of wolves that go around biting people and turning them aren’t usually to be trusted, and your instincts know that.”

“Huh,” said Clint. He still wasn’t looking at James and James felt his hand begin to twitch, wanting to reach for him, to reassure him somehow that this was a good thing, that it meant they should stay together and worry less about what it meant that James wanted to curl up in bed with Clint every night.

If Clint didn’t want to explore this mates thing fully with him though, he didn’t have to. James wasn’t going to push it. It wasn’t as if he was much like anyone’s idea of a life partner after all, not when he still couldn’t even remember his surname.

“I think perhaps I really should have spent more time talking to you two about these things,” Coulson said to Clint and Natasha. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really consider it.” He let out a sigh, then shrugged a shoulder. “I am still very new to being a pack leader.”

James felt like his thoughts were moving very slowly, tangled up with the elation he was trying to ignore until Clint indicated exactly how he felt about this. “If Clint and I are mates, does that mean you’re my pack leader as well?”

“Not immediately,” said Coulson. “Pack is a slow process. It does mean that it’s likely that I will be, after you’ve had a few months together. Pack is the group of wolves you’re closest to so if you and Clint are together, you’ll either join his pack or you’ll form one of your own. If you had your own pack, then you might both end up joining that rather than Clint staying in mine. My sister moved to San Diego with her mate, so she joined the pack he had down there rather than staying in our parents’ one.” He shrugged. “And I moved away as well and formed one with Natasha, and then Clint, so my parents are now part of a pack at the retirement centre where they live. Pack is fluid like that but mates are more fixed. If you pursue this, then you’ll always both be in the same pack.”

If they pursued it. God, James wanted to pursue it so badly. He looked at Clint, who was staring down at his knees as if he’d never seen them before.

“Clint,” he said softly, wondering if he should suggest they find a quiet place to talk about this.

“I need a walk,” announced Clint, standing up abruptly. “I’ll be back in a bit.” He strode out of the room, leaving most of his sandwich behind.

James watched him go, itching to follow but forcing himself to stay in place. He couldn’t help thinking that it didn’t look much like Clint was as eager for this as he was.

It was going to hurt even more to be rejected as a mate than it had been to be rejected as pack. James took a deep breath and focused back on his sandwich, wondering if there was any way to prepare for that. He still wasn’t very good with all the emotions he’d been flooded with since he’d broken free of Hydra’s control, but he had a feeling there was nothing he could do but suffer through them all.

****

Clint didn’t come back for a while. The rest of them finished their sandwiches, then Natasha snagged Clint’s and finished that as well while she and Coulson carried on planning their take down of Hydra.

James couldn’t bring himself to pay attention, not when he was itching to go after Clint and…

And what? Try and talk him into wanting to be his mate? He might not know much about how relationships worked, but even he knew that wasn’t it. Clint had to decide on his own if he wanted to be James’s partner or not.

After about an hour, Natasha glanced at her watch. “Okay, he’s had his moping time,” she said, standing up. “I’m going after him.”

“Try not to refer to it as ‘moping time’ when you talk to him,” said Coulson, then frowned. “Do you want me to go instead?”

She shook her head. “He’ll want you to tell him what to do,” she said, “but if I get him riled up enough, he’ll just shout out what he actually wants at me and be able to come to his own conclusions.”

Coulson nodded as if that were a tried and tested way of dealing with Clint.

“You should take him coffee,” said James, standing up to take a step towards the kitchen before forcing himself to stop, because as much as he wanted to provide what Clint needed, he didn’t know if Clint would want it from him yet. “He always has coffee after lunch.”

Natasha snorted. “That’s not how we work,” she said. “I’ll tell him you’re making some though, and that if he wants it he’ll have to come talk to you.”

James wasn’t sure how to feel about that because it almost felt like she was trying to push them together, which felt like the opposite of what he would have thought she’d want for Clint. He just nodded, then went to hide away in the kitchen, where he didn’t have to worry about either her or Coulson reading his emotions off his face.

He put the coffee machine on automatically, then braced himself on the counter, ducking his head to take a deep breath.

What would he do if Natasha got Clint riled up and what he shouted back at her was that he didn’t want a mate or, worse, that he didn’t want _James_ as a mate? Could they stay here after that, living together, pretending they were just friends hiding from the same terrorist network?

Could James still curl up in Clint’s bed every night?

No. He couldn’t do that, even if Clint was prepared to let him. He couldn’t be that close and know that the potential was there to get closer but that Clint didn’t want it.

James had been telling himself ever since they left The Boulevard that he was happy to just be friends with Clint and put aside all his other feelings, but he didn’t think he could keep lying to himself. It all hurt too much. 

If Clint did want to just be friends, he’d want to distance himself from James. He’d stop cuddling with James, stop stroking his fur and playing silly games with him. Maybe even stop letting James feed him.

James took a deep breath, and then another one. He couldn’t live like that, not without feeling this painful ache in his chest all day, every day. If Clint didn’t want this, James was going to have to go find somewhere else to hide from Hydra.

Or perhaps he could start fighting back against them. If he didn’t have anything to lose, there was no sense in him staying hidden. He could raid the weapons locker in Philadelphia and start picking off the smaller bases, the ones he knew the security codes for, and if he ended up getting taken out along the way, well. There would be no one to mourn his loss, not after sixty years of being a puppet.

The coffee machine beeped and he took a deep breath, straightening to pour out four mugs of coffee on autopilot. Make the coffee, and maybe Clint would come in and drink some, and maybe he wouldn’t tell James that he didn’t want him at the same time.

Maybe.

James’s eyes were damp as he opened the fridge for the milk and he scrubbed his hand over them. 

“Hey,” said a soft voice from the doorway and he turned immediately.

Clint was standing there looking at him with an expression that James desperately tried to read but couldn’t. Why did Clint have to choose now to start covering over his emotions?

Behind Clint’s shoulder, James could see Natasha pulling Coulson out of the house, presumably to give them privacy. Was that a good sign or not? They probably wouldn’t want to be around whichever way this went.

“I made coffee,” James said, nodding at the mugs.

“Yeah,” said Clint, not looking over at them. For the first time that James could remember, Clint was in a room with freshly-made coffee that wasn’t in his hands yet, and his attention was on something else. “Can we talk?”

“Sure,” said James, shutting the fridge door. It didn’t feel like milk was a priority right now.

Clint nodded a couple of times, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Okay, so. Um.”

James stood still, waiting for him to come out with something. Seconds ticked by.

“Look,” said Clint, pulling his hands back out of his pockets. “This thing with mates, it’s not- I didn’t know anything about it, okay?”

“Me neither,” said James. He hesitated, and then added, “I knew there was something though. Your scent, it’s…” He drifted off and just shook his head, because he’d tried putting it into words before, and they’d been the wrong words.

“Yeah,” said Clint again, with a sigh. “I know. I mean, I tried not to know, I tried to pretend it didn’t mean anything that my inner wolf just sat up and started wagging its tail whenever you got close, because I like to think I’m a rational guy and I’m not ruled by what an animal thinks I should be doing, but yeah. I smelt it too. Why do you think I didn’t break out of that bar while you were out getting supplies?”

“You tried to,” James pointed out. “You weren’t strong enough.”

Clint sent him a half-hearted smirk. “Oh, I could have got out. I was going to rig up a lever, I had a plan. And then I thought about you coming back to find the place empty, and I just...I couldn’t. So I went wolf instead, and waited for you. And then I brought you along with me when I came out here, and let you share my bed and all that touching and petting, that’s- Natasha’s right. That’s not something we’ve ever done as a pack. I shoulda known it was different, but I didn’t want to examine it all too closely.” He shrugged, looking helpless. “You’d lie down to sleep next to me, I’d rest my hand on your fur and I’d sleep straight through, no nightmares or anything. You’ve no idea how long it’s been since I’ve been able to do that.”

“I’m glad I could help,” said James, and his voice came out so low he had to clear his throat and repeat it. God, he still couldn’t tell what Clint wanted. Was he just telling James all this so he could explain all the stuff they were going to have to stop doing? Or was he getting ready to ask for more of it? James’s heart leapt into his throat at just the thought of that, and he had to take a deep breath.

“You’ve done nothing but help,” said Clint, taking a step closer, then halting awkwardly in the middle of the room. “You saved my life, and you kept me safe, and you’ve been- I don’t think I’ve ever made friends with someone as quickly as I did with you, not even when I was a kid. I had no idea I could feel anything like this, not as a human, not as a wolf, not in any way. And, James-” He paused to take a deep breath, then took another step, so he was close enough to touch, if James had had the courage to reach out for him. “I want to keep feeling it. I want to see how much more there is, now we know about this mates thing.”

It felt like all the oxygen had left James’s lungs in a rush. “Oh,” he said, hearing it as if from a distance.

“Is that okay?” asked Clint. “I get it if it’s not, you’ve just come out of a really fucking traumatic few decades, I don’t want to crowd you with stuff you’re not ready for, we can leave it and just be friends until you’re settled, or forever even, if you don’t want to have that with me, I mean, I’d get that, I’m-”

James couldn’t bear to listen to his panicked babble any longer, so he reached out for his shoulder, pulling him in closer and tapping into those faded memories from The Boulevard to press his lips to Clint’s and kiss him like he’d been wanting to do for days.

Clint made a faint noise of surprise then stepped into it, wrapping his arms around James to kiss him back and it was like nothing James had ever experienced before, sensations rushing through him as he shut his eyes and concentrated entirely on Clint.

All those feelings of safety and comfort that Clint’s scent had evoked in him were catching fire into need and want, and James couldn’t stop himself from wrapping his arms around Clint’s back, feeling the shift of his muscles under his shirt, all the beautiful lines of them that he’d traced over with his eyes and was now getting to trace over with his hands.

“Oh,” said Clint, sounding shocked as they broke apart so they could gasp in some air. “That was- fuck, James. That was incredible.” He dipped his head, pulling James’s lips back towards his. “We’re going to need to do that a lot more,” he said, their mouths so close that James could feel Clint’s lips moving against his as he spoke.

“I think I can manage that,” said James breathlessly, and sank back into Clint’s kiss, clinging on to him and wondering how anything could feel this good.

****

Coulson and Natasha didn’t come back for a while, but when they did Clint and James were still kissing and the coffee had gone cold a long time ago. Clint had pushed James back against the fridge and had his hands under his shirt while James had the fingers that could feel how soft it was sunk in Clint’s hair, and his metal hand cupped firmly around Clint’s ass.

Damn, it was a good ass.

“Surely that was enough time for them to get over this,” said Natasha, while both James and Clint ignored their presence.

Coulson let out a tired sigh. “I mentioned my sister disappeared for a month-long sex marathon, didn’t I?”

There was a contemplative pause from both of them as James gripped tighter at Clint’s hair, tugging it just enough for Clint to choke down a groan.

“We should leave sooner rather than later,” said Natasha.

“As soon as we can,” agreed Coulson, then came over to tap Clint on the shoulder. “Come on, Barton, that’s enough for now.”

“Not sure it’s ever going to be enough,” said Clint in a dazed voice as he pulled his mouth away from James’s, but stayed plastered to his body apart from that. “You guys haven’t even seen his dick, it’s seriously impressive, I really need to spend some quality time with it.”

James snorted, tipping his head back against the fridge. “That can be arranged,” he said, because he might not remember ever getting further than kissing before, but he had a feeling he’d once had moves. He could feel the information on how to grind against Clint in just the right way to make him moan seeping into his mind, without any background on when he’d learnt it.

“No,” said Coulson, sharply. “Move apart.”

Clint let out a sigh and muttered, “Yes, pack leader,” sarcastically, but he took a step back, separating their bodies. 

James felt bereft as soon as they were no longer touching. A moment later Clint reached out to take his hand and James beamed at him, squeezing his fingers in return.

“Oh my god,” said Natasha. “Do we really have to watch this?”

“Natasha and I have come up with a plan,” said Coulson. “Come and listen to it.”

“Sure thing,” said Clint, not looking away from James’s face for a moment. It felt like James’s heart was going to break open with happiness. 

Natasha made a disgusted noise and waved her hand in front of Clint’s face to break their gaze. “Anyone would think you weren’t interested in eradicating the terrorists who have infiltrated SHIELD,” she muttered.

“No, no, I am,” said Clint, turning away from James and following her into the lounge. “Just, I’m interested in James’s cock as well. It’s such a _nice_ cock, Natasha, you have no idea.”

Coulson fixed James with a look and James felt his cheeks flushing pink. He cleared his throat. “After you,” he said, waving in the direction of the lounge, because Clint’s comments, and their make out session before that, had left him more than a little flustered and he needed a moment to collect himself.

Coulson’s look grew faintly amused and he headed out to the lounge. James took a deep breath and allowed himself a moment to just be blissfully happy that Clint wanted this, wanted _him_ , then followed after him.

Natasha and Coulson’s plan was long and involved, and started with faking Coulson’s death so that he could form a secret team within SHIELD to track Hydra while Natasha did her best to infiltrate and feed information back to him. They were going to approach agents they were sure of slowly, pulling them in one by one to avoid Hydra noticing, and…

And James lost track after that, because Clint shifted his leg just enough to press their knees together and he got distracted by thinking about just exactly what they might do together as soon as they were alone in the house. Clint had seemed pretty eager to get close to James, would he want to go to bed straight away? Would James? 

He pictured it, both of them naked together in Clint’s bed, and felt his ears go red. Yeah, he did want that. He really wanted that, and screw moving too fast or whatever. He’d wanted that since he’d met Clint, they’d waited long enough.

Clint’s leg tapped against his again, and James found his eyes drawn to it, to the strong shape of his thigh underneath his sweatpants.

He wanted to curl his hand around it.

He clenched his fist and then wondered why he was holding back. Clint had been pretty open with reaching out for James, even before the revelations of today. He’d played with his hair and patted his shoulder and all the other things that had made Natasha stare at them, and James had just sat still for it and let him. He hadn’t reached out in return at all, too scared of doing something that was unwelcome.

Clint had made it clear that he was welcome, though. James gently reached out and set his hand around Clint’s thigh, exactly where he’d imagined it. Clint glanced at him with a grin, then set his hand over James’s and gave it a squeeze.

“Oh god,” muttered Natasha, and stood up. “You,” she said, pointing at James. “We’re swapping seats. We need you guys to concentrate and tell us if we’re missing anything obvious here.”

James reluctantly got up, sharing a look with Clint before sitting back down. It did make it easier to concentrate on what Natasha and Coulson were saying, although he wasn’t sure he could help much. He had been the weapon that got pointed at a mission, not the guy planning one out. Other than giving them information about Hydra’s likely reaction to certain things, he didn’t have much to add.

Clint did, once he wasn’t sending concealed smiles at James instead of listening. He put in intelligent, insightful comments, and James realised he had a sharp tactical mind behind his goofy grins and bad jokes. He thought back to the competence Clint had shown while they’d been travelling out here, covering their trail with ease, and he wondered why he was so surprised.

His mate was smart as well as beautiful. James found himself smiling again, and wondered if he’d even stopped since the first time they’d kissed.

He couldn’t imagine why he would have.

****

Coulson and Natasha left once it got dark, both of them slipping into wolf shape before jogging off in opposite directions. James and Clint watched them go from the porch, stars coming to life over their heads as twilight faded.

Clint nudged his shoulder against James’s, then slung his arm around his waist, pulling him in close. “Hey, so, technically it’s early,” he said, “but want to go to bed?”

James turned away from the outside world to focus on Clint’s face. “Seems like a plan,” he said, leaning up to kiss him, then he hesitated. “Both of us human, right?”

Clint snorted. “Oh yeah,” he said, leaning in to return James’s kiss. “I have plans for certain human parts of you.”

That sounded good. That sounded really good. James pulled Clint in even closer for their next kiss, and Clint shifted so he could press his leg between James’s, tight up against his erection. James sucked in a breath because he’d never felt anything that good, at least not that he could remember. “Oh god,” he murmured against Clint’s lips. “Yeah, bed. Now.”

Clint pulled away, beaming at him, then hesitation crossed his face. “Unless we’re moving too fast,” he said. “I don’t- I can wait, I get that this is all very new to you, I don’t want you to feel pressured. We can just snuggle, maybe kiss some more.”

James ran his fingers into Clint’s hair, feeling it brush across his skin. “I guess it is new to me now,” he agreed, “although I don’t think it always was. That guy I remembered at The Boulevard, I reckon I did a lot more than kissing and snuggling with him. And maybe others, I don’t know. The idea of doing that kinda stuff with you doesn’t feel new, it just feels like something I really, really want.” 

He leaned in to kiss Clint again, then added, “As soon as possible,” to make sure his point definitely got across.

“Yeah,” agreed Clint, sounding as breathless as James felt. “Let’s get on that, then.” He tugged James’s hand, leading him inside the house, and James happily followed.

****

It was long past evening and far into the middle of the night when James settled back into the pillows of what he was pretty sure was just their bed now. Clint was sprawled half on top of him, his face pressed into James’s neck and his arm loosely wrapped around James’s waist as if he couldn’t stand to let go.

“We shoulda been doing that since The Boulevard,” Clint muttered into James’s skin.

“Yeah,” agreed James, although he probably wouldn’t have been ready for it back then. He might not have even known he wanted it, back when even playing cards had felt like a big step. 

Of course, he had known that he wanted to get closer to Clint, to be able to enjoy his scent without feeling odd about it, and now he could.

He curled his arm tighter around Clint’s shoulders then dipped his face to take in a lungful of his scent. He could smell his own scent mingled in with it, and the mix of them both branded over Clint’s skin was making every part of him, wolf and human, want to purr with happiness.

Now there was no question that Clint belonged to him, and that James belonged right back.

Clint started humming under his breath, skipping half the notes and missing some of the others so that it took James a while to recognise it as the song he always sang in the shower.

“Do you even know any other songs?” he asked.

Clint groaned, then moved back so he could glare down at James. “It’s your damn fault,” he said. “That stupid bar, I just hear the name and I get it stuck in my head. _Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard…_ ”

“Nope,” interrupted James. “Not my fault. You were singing it before we even met, up on that warehouse roof when you were meant to be on a mission.”

Clint rolled his eyes and slumped back down onto James. “Doesn’t count because I don’t remember it,” he said. “Because, you know, you _drugged_ me.”

James snorted. “You drugged me right back,” he pointed out. “One breath of your scent…”

“I know, I know,” said Clint, sounding pleased. “You broke all your shackles and went on the run for me.” He lifted his head again. “Hey, have I said thank you for that?”

James shrugged. “What else was I going to do?”

Clint leaned in close to his mouth. “Thank you,” he said in a soft, heartfelt voice. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re very welcome,” said James, feeling dazed again, as he seemed to be any time Clint leaned in close and spoke with that much affection in his voice. He wondered if he could blame it on the mates thing, but he had a feeling it was just how he reacted to Clint.

How he would always react to Clint, because they were mates, and they had the chance to spend the rest of their lives together.

Fuck, he could remember how much it had hurt when he’d thought Clint was walking away from him in the bar, and how desperately he’d wanted something like this instead, even if he hadn’t truly realised exactly what this was then. And now he had it all, he had a future with Clint at his side, returning all these feelings that James still hadn’t managed to fully get his head around.

Well, except for the biggest, most obvious one of course. The one he’d known about even back in the bar.

The one it was maybe time to let out into the light.

“Hey,” he said, matching Clint’s soft tone and curving his hand around the back of Clint’s neck to keep him close. “I love you.”

Clint just stared at him for a moment, then a smile spread across his face. “Fuck, James,” he said. “I’m so lucky they sent you to kidnap me and turn me into their drone.” He leaned in and kissed James, then added, “I love you too.”

And there it was, the dazed feeling that James was living in a fantasy world, because there was no way this could be real. There was no way that Clint could actually love a guy like him, who couldn’t remember most of his life, and the bits he did have a handle on were nothing but blood and pain.

Except Clint was still smiling at him and leaning in to kiss him with as much emotion as James could feel thrumming through his own veins.

“Hey, it feels like maybe it’s time for round two,” he said, and James grinned at him. 

“Definitely,” he agreed, and rolled them over so that he could brace himself above Clint, leaning in to kiss him while his hands started to trace over his skin again.

****

A few weeks later, James was so comfortable in the life they’d shaped together that it felt like it had been going on for a lot longer. It seemed weird that there had been a time before all this, before starting each morning by making Clint coffee and breakfast while he sang that same damn song in the shower. He had at least heard the original version now, and had to admit it was kinda catchy when it wasn’t being belted out acappella by a man who hadn’t put his hearing aids in yet.

After breakfast, James usually shifted to wolf to run around through the woods, checking their boundaries and tracking any unusual smells to make sure no one had been snooping around. After decades of keeping his wolf side under strict control, only letting it out to complete a mission and then shutting it down again, he couldn’t believe how great it felt to let it out to just run around and enjoy the woods.

Today when he came back from his run, he found Clint at his range. He followed the sound of arrows hitting the target, trotting around to the open barn doors to find that Clint hadn’t bothered putting a shirt on after breakfast. He sat back on his haunches to watch, enjoying the way his back muscles flexed.

Eventually Clint pulled himself out of the reverie he went into when shooting and glanced towards James.

“What to play catch?” he asked, waving an arrow in the air.

James rolled his eyes, heading over to greet him with an affectionate nuzzle. Clint dropped into a crouch to run his hands over James’s fur and James wriggled with delight at the sensation, then pressed his nose into Clint’s neck to take a breath of his scent, letting the familiarity of it wash over him like a pure shot of happiness. Like how it felt to not only finally have a home, but to know what one was.

“Or we could go for a run?” suggested Clint, and James felt his face light up at the idea. Running with Clint was very different to running alone, mostly because it turned into more of a fight, wrestling each other and tumbling over in the undergrowth, until it was time to head back to the house and have a shower, usually together.

“Hang on then,” said Clint, pulling back to set his bow and quiver down so he could take off his pants, leaving him nakes except for the collar around his neck. He pulled out his hearing aids and zipped them away, then shifted to his wolf form. He sent a wide, tongue-lolling grin at James, then darted forward to playfully knock him down before running for the trees.

James was up in a second, running after him, exhilaration flooding through him as he chased his mate through their home. Maybe he wasn’t ever going to remember more about his past or who he’d been before Hydra got hold of him, but he had something to hold on to now that was worth more than all of that.

He had Clint.


End file.
